Wrapping it all Up

So now that we're wrapping up our projects and finishing up the semester, I can reflect on this class and think about some of the things that I learned and will take with me into my current teaching career and my future administrative career. I can also reflect on some of the frustrations that I had and probably will have in the real world as well.

An Eye-Opening Experience
It's not often that I have participated in something, classes included, which left me totally questioning everything I do in my job and everything that I have been taught in the past. This, however, is not a bad thing. This is an awesome thing. I found, while taking this class, that my eyes were really opened to how I can make education more effective and why there are so many frustrations in education in the world today. I always kind of complained about the way that certain things worked (like testing, curriculum expectations, etc.), but after this class I can actually pinpoint some of the problems that I see in education and work on bettering them for myself and my students. I know now that I need to really contemplate what I want my students to come out of my class understanding and what I want them to take with them for years to come. I also really need to ask myself if my activities in class are really helping the kids get to the understandings that I hope they will have? Do my means justify my ends? I have learned so many things that I now ask myself all the time that I am really excited to start a new school year and hopefully make more of a difference.

Frustrations
With all of this wonderful information that I have acquired this semester, there are some frustrations that I am still grappling with. One of those frustrations has to do with assessments. I really believe that creating a meaningful assessment to check for enduring understandings is so important, but I also think that this task is very challenging on a couple levels. In creating the assessments for our UbD projects, we constantly kept going back to make the rubrics and expectations more and more specific and I suppose that that is something that may become easier with time. On another level, as I think about transferring what I now know about assessments into the classroom, I am a little daunted by the amount of time that goes into creating these meaningful activities and assessments. I suppose that I would just have to take things little by little.

I suppose that what's more frustrating is that the changes that I am trying to make are changes that I am really making by myself. I will certainly share ideas and concepts with my grade level teachers, but nobody is looking to see that these changes are made. It frustrates me that my district is not working towards curriculum design that follows the UbD format when it's clear that this is the way that it should work. I know, at this time in my life, that this is something that I can't really do anything about which makes it worse! I will, however, share my groups UbD project with my administrators because they are looking to revamp the new teacher program. Baby steps!

Overall, this has been a great experience that has really taught me a lot about the way education works today versus the way that it should work. I hope, after I finish this program, to be able to help in the push to revamp education so that it actually makes sense.