At the meeting/discussion with Dr. Ball on Friday, October 11th, myself, several professors of education at UT and graduate students studying to be educators listened and discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the education program at the University of Tennessee compared to that of the University of Michigan.
I found it surprising that at the University of Michigan, in their education program, professors do not provide grades to their students for projects completed during their practicum until much later in the semester. This confuses me, because if I am doing poorly in my class, I would want to know my grades as soon as possible so that if I am making any mistakes, I can correct them sooner rather than later. Dr. Ball said that students are more focused on their grades than what they are actually doing in their practicum placement if grades are given early. This would cause more stress for me, because I would be unaware of my progress in the class.
There are two things Dr. Ball discussed that I would like apply to my future classroom. First of all, Dr. Ball talked about using elaborate rubrics for grading performance assessments of students. As a future Special Education teacher, I am extremely pro-rubrics when grading many assignments, but especially performance assessments. This is due to the fact that I want to focus more on the effort given to the assessment by the student. Rubrics also help to evaluate all of the different elements of the students performance assessment. Therefore, I plan to have many rubrics to help me grade assessments.
Dr. Ball also discussed how teachers should address diversity in the classroom. One of the most important elements to provide to all students in your classroom is a respectful and open community of learners. By offering the class a friendly, open and respectful classroom full of different types of learners, every student will feel free to contribute to the classroom. I plan to provide my students with this type of atmosphere when I am an educator and I also plan to have circle groups when there is conflict in the classroom or when the classroom wants to have a discussion about specific topics.
Dr. Ball brought up an extremely valid point about the Elementary Education and Special Education programs at UT. These two programs are unequal as far as the "preparedness" of students when they go out into the world to teach their own classrooms. Special Education majors are required to take more classes that go into great depth of the content of teaching. Special Education majors also take a whole year of education courses that stress classroom management, content coverage, universal instruction design and addressing the unique needs of every student in the classroom. While taking these classes, Special Education majors also go to four different schools to see how different classrooms work and are able to practice these techniques with their mentor teachers. Special Education students also teach in every single one of these classrooms- this is called practicum.
Elementary Education majors spend one semester in approximately four or five education courses and teach in two different schools- practicum. Both education program students can participate in an internship year after they finish their undergraduate courses. However, Special Education majors gain more insight during their internships because they have a deeper understanding of how different classrooms operate, what techniques to use when teaching and how to address the needs of every student. Therefore, Elementary Education majors are unprepared to teach and end up spending most of their time teaching themselves the content they should have learned and applied during their undergraduate years.
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