EDU 379: Inquiry into Curriculum, Technology and Teaching

This course is for undergraduate students who are in their first professional block courses and who are completing 50 hours of practicum in a local elementary classroom. I consider this an introductory course highlighting three central components to elementary classroom instruction: curriculum, technology and, of course, teaching. Please click here to view an example of my course syllabus.

I am in my fourth semester of teaching this course and believe that I've well identified and developed its components. This course has students explore the idea of curriculum. What is curriculum and who is it designed for? To model this well, I have created a curriculum map for this course that I use with students in the course. Please click here to view the curriculum map. Students view different curricula maps used in a variety of different schools to gain a better sense of the practical use of curricula maps in school districts today. Students also gain a broad perspective of curricula by being instructed on the NYS Learning Standards and its relationship to national standards and local curricula and eventually to teachers' lesson plans. Understanding the larger scope of curricula is often challenging for preservice teachers, because they are developmentally not always ready to simultaneously understand the intricacies of lesson planning and the larger, overarching curricular umbrella. Still, we need teachers who are strong with lesson planning and curricula design so its essential that it's part of their preservice program.

Another central aspect to this course is to understand effective teaching. How do we effectively teach in today's elementary classrooms that have perhaps the most diverse population in our nation's classrooms' history? To answer this for my students, I've purposively included differentiation as one of the strongest themes that runs throughout this course. I use Carol Ann Tomlinson's work with differentiation to help students identify four different ways that they can help their future elementary students to have access to all lessons. Students learn that differentiation can be included (1) in the content; (2) with the process; (3) with the assessment; and (4) with the environment. I'm still working to develop a future assignment that students can implement in their own practicum placement that will meaningfully include these differentiation ideas in a practical way so they can develop their own rationale for its need. Perhaps most important, my students may then realize the value of differentiation because they could realize that all students will learn, process and show what they know differently so we must develop ways to meaningfully identify and facilitate the elementary students' learning and sharing of their own knowledge gains.

The third central aspect of this course is technology. To address this, I hold our class in computer labs periodically throughout the semester so students can explore ways that technology can enhance instruction to maximize all students' instruction. I include instruction on appropriate child-friendly and child-safe search engines (click here to view the student handout), on various websites that can enhance different content areas (click here to view a sample handout), and websites that can connect teachers and their classes around the world to work on shared projects and to participate in elearning activities (click here to view a sample handout). I also work with students to build a professional portfolio using an online environment called Taskstream to showcase their work.

I still consider myself in the early stages of developing and revising this course. My plan for upcoming semesters is to teach students in this class about educational research and to implement an undergraduate research project with them. I plan to use the technology information that I mentioned above about connecting elementary classrooms around the world by (1) asking my elementary students to survey their practicum teachers to identify ways that they use technology to educate their students about other students around the world and then to (2) identify one website that they could use to establish a small scale project that they could implement with their host teacher during their practicum. As a class, we would study the host teachers' perceptions of using the internet to make world-wide student-to-student connections. I plan to implement this during an upcoming semester I am assigned to teach the course.