Section 2

1.  I feel that I generally employ a relativist stance when it comes to educating students.  The reason I take this stance is because I believe that students learn better when they are taking ownership of their learning.   There have been instances in my teaching past where I have presented the same lesson but in two different ways.  I have found that when I presented the lesson to the students in a way that they could relate to it was far more successful and had a greater impact on their learning.  Most of my students have always wanted to know why they are learning certain things.  When I can make that personal connection to their life it helps them to be invested more in whatever topic/subject we are learning about.

The first thing that popped into my mind about a conflict in my educational history was my experiences in professional development.  Being a specialized teacher, there has been times where I have had to sit through professional development that I felt were not related to my subject matter.  Since I struggled to relate with the topic, I found that often times I would lose interest in the presentation and not take proper notes.  One thing I did in this situation to effectively solve the issue was communicate with my administrators.  Through communication with administrators I have been able to attend more training for my area so that I can maximize my learning opportunities.  When I am in a training that doesn’t directly relate to my subject, I have tried to find connections so that I can acquire something beneficial from every learning experience.

2.      I felt the learning theory that I most frequently use is Robert Gagne’s Theory of Instruction.  I like his nine events of instruction and feel that each event is something we have been trained to do as a teacher.  The framework helps to keep me organized and present the learning in an order that should help students be successful.  We also were taught about how important the feedback part of the lesson is.  I like how this is a critical part of Gagne’s instructional theory.

When I was a kindergarten teacher, we would work on teaching the spacing of words during Writer’s Workshop.  I would always start the lesson by showing two objects crashing into each other.  After gaining the students interest (step one in Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction)I would then state the goal of how we have to have spaces in between our words or else it be like they were crashing into each other.  This format of presenting the lesson was very effective and helped my students to learn the basics of writing.  I feel that every lesson or presentation of learning should try and hook their audience in.  By gaining the interest of the learner, the learner will be more inclined to have the proper focus required to facilitate learning.

                                                Robert Gagne