Content Knowledge (Course II)
1.
Describe how outside-school experience(s) have
expanded or deepened your subject area content knowledge, and tell how it
enhanced or changed your understanding. Include at least one specific
experience.
Outside-school
experiences have expanded and deepened my subject area content knowledge in a
multitude of ways. I feel that a great deal of my content knowledge has been
acquired outside of the classroom. These experiences include going to work with
my dad and asking a never-ending series of questions about his job, going to
museums and exhibits with my family during the summertime, helping the girls I used to
nanny for with their homework, and various different volunteer jobs.
One specific
experience I can remember is when I was in middle school and I was part of a
youth council. We completed a number of different community service projects
throughout the year, but one project specifically that I remember was when we
went to the Monument Crisis Center and spent time with the children and
families there. One of the families at the center had two young girls, probably
in about 2nd or 3rd grade. The girls were working on
their homework and so my supervisor said that I could go and sit with them and
see if they needed help. One of the girls was working on her math homework
where she was working on multiplication problems. I remember that she was stuck
on a particular problem and I was trying to figure out a way to explain it to
her. I knew that she understood her addition facts because I could see she had
worked out the previous addition problems without trouble. I decided to
encourage her to solve the multiplication problem by adding the numbers
multiple times (using repeated addition). Having to think of a different way to
explain a multiplication problem to the girl helped me to expand and deepen the
way I thought about various math problems, a subject I was not particularly
good at.
2.
Respond to the class discussion of Ball’s “The
Subject Matter Preparation of Teachers.” Have your initial judgments or
opinions change based on the discussion?
The discussion of
Ball’s “The Subject Matter Preparation of Teachers” really just reaffirmed my
own thinking while reading the article. I was really surprised that an article
that was written so long ago still had so much relevance and truth in the
education profession today. It seemed as though a majority of my classmates
found themselves asking the same questions that came to mind for me as I was
reading: How can teachers really have all the subject matter knowledge to teach
prior to going out and actually teaching it? What can we do to better prepare
teachers in training? How can we as teachers work to improve our subject matter
knowledge when we teach so many subjects in such a variety of grade levels?
My small group
focused on discussing the quote on page 9 of the Ball article: “Helping
students learn subject matter involves more than the delivery of facts and
information. The goal of teaching is to assist students in developing
intellectual resources to enable them to participate in, not merely to know
about, the major domains of human thought and inquiry in the discipline.” We
particularly were discussing this quote in its relationship to History and
Social Studies and how many teachers simply present students with facts and
dates to be memorized. We discussed how this does not adequately prepare
students because they are not forced to think critically about what they are
reading or to look at history as a narrative—a story told from a point of view.
We all agreed that it is important to encourage students to question what they
learn, even in a discipline where information is often presented as concrete
facts, and participate in intelligent discussions about the content.
3.
Where are you in developing and pursuing a line
of inquiry? What is your question? Are you satisfied with your question? At this point, what do you know about the research
available in this area? What ideas do
you have for possible experiential learning sources?
I am focusing on
investigating the topic of students with autism in mainstream classrooms.
Specifically, the two major questions I have been researching thus far are: How
does the mainstreaming of students with autism improve their communication and
social skills? And also, what strategies are most effective for managing
problem behaviors of students with autism in a mainstream classroom?
While my questions
are still somewhat broad, I am satisfied with them.
I have found a
variety of research available in this area, ranging from articles published in
psychiatric and psychological journals to studies of autistic students in
general education classrooms and their social interactions with their
non-autistic peers. Most of the sources I have found thus far are secondary
sources. I plan to search for several books that I have heard about through
friends who are special education teachers that are written by autistic
individuals about their own personal experiences.
For possible
experiential learning sources, I was thinking about trying to find general
education teachers who have had autistic students in their classes and
interviewing them about what strategies worked well both for developing those
students’ social skills as well as behavior management.
An additional, and
vague, idea I had was to search for autism organizations and see if there were
any conferences or resources I could utilize.
A few informative, interesting resources on Autism:
