Week 12

The first set of competencies that I would like to cover in this response is the ID, training manager, and instructor competencies as found in table 27.3 on pg 275-276. After reading through the table, I feel that my main strength is that of being an instructor because of the teacher background. An instructor in ID seems to be exactly what most of us try to accomplish in our own classrooms. Although I do feel that I need to work on my instructional methods and strategies to better integrate technology into the classroom.
Strengths
Professional Foundations
As a teacher you are constantly communicating with students, parents, and administration, while trying to comply with the legal standards handed down by the state and federal government through the benchmarks. A teacher also must keep up their training and schooling, at least in Michigan, to keep their license and professional credibility up to date.
Planning and Preparation
This is a personal strength because over the last three years, I have been able to be more comfortable with my subject matter. This leads me to be able to plan and prepare better and more complete instruction.
Weakness
Instructional Methods and Strategies
I personally do not feel that this is a horrible weakness to have as a teacher. Reason being that if I am trying to keep the interest of students in the lesson I am teaching, the ability to stimulate and sustain motivation in them is a must. I have use power points for the last two years of teaching, which has allowed me to be a better presenter of information and allow for a greater amount of clarification and feedback from the students. I believe that I am not to a level though that is promoting the retention of knowledge and skills of where I want to be. Overall I label this as my weakness because I always want to improve and do not want to be complacent.

The second set of competencies I would like to talk about is set associated with online instruction. This is an area that I would love to build over the years, but as of right now it is a total and complete weakness. In my classroom I try to allow for discussion based learning to happen by presenting the class with at problem and idea that they come up with the ideas for. Then we come together as a class to discuss the answer and I can fix any questions that they have about the topic. The main competencies in table 27.4 that I would love to develop is the idea of establishing ground rules for the discussion but only have minimal interaction with the students. As of right now, I would consider myself a little bit of a control freak in the classroom, so if I could have an online class it would allow me to be able to have class lead by the students and it would force me to sit back and watch what they are learning.

The last set of competencies that I would like to develop for my professional goals is that of a training manager and the section of responsibility to others in table 27.5 on page 277. My ultimate goal of earning this degree is to help bring technology into the classroom, but also to be able to help other teachers with questions that they have on their educational tools. Sometimes I forget that some teachers are not as ready to have the technology aspect brought into their classroom. In my district there are still teachers that keep grades by hand in a grade-book. The main idea I would have to work with is being fair in my interactions with these teachers because they have been teaching longer than I have and have a great deal of knowledge outside of technology.