After a few pieces of administrivia, we got down to business.  Here’s all the update that’s fit to print:

Name/Ball Pass Challenge

In an effort to further connect names to faces (not to mention to get out of our seats, active, and have some fun!), we played took the Name / Ball Pass Challenge.  The instructions are here – Name / Ball Pass Instructions.  The goal is to call names, pass the ball, and beat a group-selected goal time.  With the help of some clever suggestions for how to tackle the task, we managed to whittle our time for one cycle of the game from 54 seconds to 18.  No small feat.

Teaching is…?

Next up, we took some time to explore metaphors for teaching by completing the sentence “Teaching is…”.  Groups finished this sentence with ideas such as:

• a tree
• climing a mountain
• a lighthouse
• a haunted house at a carnival

Then, we asked you to extend the metaphor and consider the question: “If teaching is…, then learning to teach means…”.  There were countless interesting ideas shared in class.  The goal here was to get you thinking about your conceptions of teacher education and, as time goes on, we’ll see how those ideas evolve as you venture through the teacher ed program.

When the metaphorical thinking had wrapped, Shep posed the big question that this program has you explore on that journey: Is teaching for me? With each class hopefully an answer to that question will come more clearly in focus.

The What and How of Teacher Ed

To wrap up, we asked you to consider exactly what sorts of things you wanted to get out of this professional program and how you wanted to learn those things.  Shep and I gathered your thoughts – written in T-charts – and we will use that information to inform the creation of a course outline for this class – EDUC 316 – and EDUC 310, Principles of Teaching.

As class went on, I touched on two topics that might be of interest to you as you start working in your practicum classroom:

Random Reign of Terror Cards

Take a deck of playing cards and write the name of each student in your class on a card.  Over the years, I have used my RROT cards for countless tasks.  For example, they come in handy when you want to randomly:

• create student groups
• choose speaking orders
• find a “volunteer”
• ask someone to respond to a question

Differentiated Instruction

When reporting out on their teaching metaphors, one group chose to present their thinking via a role play instead of an informal oral presentation.  Allowing students to play with a variety of different modes of content presentation is one aspect of differentiated instruction.  You can find out more about DI in many places.  Here’s a primer on Differentiated Instruction at Wikipedia.

That’s all for now.

– Lawrence