Week 4 of Cedo 550

This week we have focused on student centered instruction and differentiation of assignments.  Up until this school year, my teaching was very teacher centered.  I did a lot of lecturing and sharing of notes.  After going through Stritch, however, I have picked up a lot of strategies and have been changing the way I have been teaching to a more student centered approach.  I am putting most of my time into switching from teacher centered to student center learning in my Civics class.  The students are given a scenario and are expected to investigate the information, instead of me sharing every little bit of information with the students.  We still hold discussions, with me as the facilitator, but after the students have investigated the information asked of them.  I have also helped my team teacher in Life Science do teaching in this way as well. 

We were instructed to make an authentic assessment for our newly differentiated lesson.  I found that rubrics  really rate what the student is learning.  This works very well with the assignments I give in Civics class. I can honestly show where the student is based on what is expected of the student and what type of input the student put into his/her assignment.   I like the rubric I made because I can accurately see where they did well and were they were lacking.  It also shows them that I am stressing that they learn the content.  I do grade on spelling and grammar, but for many of my students this is a very difficult thing for them to master and I think it is a good thing for me to show them that their content is worth more than a few spelling errors. 

I really enjoyed learning about more differentiation strategies.  For example, for my civics assignment, I am now going to allow students to share their ideas in pictures and video rather than just text.  This small thing can help many students who tend not to be very skilled in writing.

This week has been very informational and I am looking forward to Tuesday when I can present my class discussion on qualities of a successful online student.