Highlights from research course

This course has taught me that there is a wealth of knowledge out there to help me in achieving my goals in this research project and future projects. There are several lectures, readings, searches, assignments and activities, discussion boards, and Blogs.

The discussion board topics in each of my classes has taught me that I have a cohort of other professionals to bounce ideas off of. I have also found that I am not in this alone and that many schools have similar problems. I have taken some of their ideas and am going to present them to my committee that is helping me and see if we can implement them into our program.

The lectures have been somewhat helpful. I found that it was the same lecture for a couple of weeks in a row. Sometimes they were helpful and then other times they had no bearing on what I was doing that week. For example, in week five the lecture talked about setting up an appointment during week four with our site supervisor. So I had to learn to pull the relevant information from the lecture that applied to that week which was a little tricky for me.

The readings were very helpful when clarifying the assignments and activities. This whole course was on research, what I learned from the readings is that as a teacher I already did this in some shape or form. What I needed to do was take it from my classroom to a larger scale of the entire school, something that would affect more than my hundred students.

The assignment and activities helped me work through my motivation project and apply it to the whole school. I did motivation for my class and wanted to take it to the whole school but was not sure how. The high school that we feed into does a study hall twice a week but the students who had all assignments completed still had to sit in study hall. I wanted the students to have the study hall but I also wanted to allow for those that had completed their work could receive some sort of reward for their hard work the previous week. This is where the thirty minute activity came in. One of the assignments during this class made me sit down with my site supervisor and bounce ideas off of her. She also brought up some very good points about logistics and getting certain things done. I was able to tweak some aspects of the plan and take things to the committee and answer some questions before they are going to be asked by the teachers in the school. I also will now be able to do some comparisons at the end of the year looking at diversity, attendance and also was it beneficial in the area that we wanted it in, the state mandated test.

The blog has been the newest thing for me. I have known many teachers that blog but I have never followed them. But by doing a blog of my own, it has forced me to be very honest and vulnerable to criticism from people that I have never met or may never meet. But it also has opened me up to a world out there where other professionals are doing great things and following their blogs it gives me the opportunity to help and learn from people I do not know.

As a teacher I always use searches to better my teaching and supplement my lessons in my classroom. Sometimes it is a video about football that talks about Pythagorean Theorem, other times is is an online game that may enhance a lesson that I just taught. But with searches, one needs to make sure you are researching as well. There is some crap out there.

All of things have become very beneficial to me in my studies and bettering myself as a teacher and as a further my career in becoming a principal. I look forward to the other classes in this program and using the skills that I learned in this course to help me in the future ones.