EDU 510: Inquiry into Teaching, Technology and Research (MST)

I taught Inquiry into Teaching, Technology and Research for all but two semesters that I have been a faculty member at Cortland. This is the entry course that students take as part of a Master's in Science of Teaching degree. Students who are admitted into this program have an undergraduate degree in an area other than Childhood Education. Therefore, students in this course have very diverse backgrounds, interests, and experiences that can be shared during each class. I have found that students' prior knowledge from their previous education or places of employment makes MST classrooms a wonderfully dynamic place to be. For example, when talking about how to include students with disabilities in typical classrooms, I had a student in my class who was a teaching assistant and worked directly with students who had autism and Down syndrome. The teaching assistant was able to portray the complexities of including all students in lessons in meaningful ways to two of her classmates who had previous careers in business. I observed the ways that the students conversed together and as I've reflected on this exchange, I've learned about the many valuable ways that students can learn from each other.  I've learned that it is important to continue to facilitate peer-to-peer conversations because students co-construct their knowledge and learning.

EDU 510 has a wonderful balance of inquiry into three topics critical to facilitating students to become an effective teacher. To view my course syllabus please click here. To view past assignments and grading rubrics, please click here to visit the course website I created and click on the provided links to view my work. I currently use an elearning environment to provide an electronic copy of assignments and grading rubrics for my students. Please click here to view a screenshot of my work in elearning.

I begin this class by having students inquire into what makes a teacher effective. Students work in small groups to brainstorm and list characteristics and qualities that they believe make a teacher effective. They've included personality characteristics such as caring, thoughtful, welcoming and nice. In addition, they've mentioned that teachers should create a welcoming environment for all students. One of the most interesting discoveries that, throughout the past semesters that I've taught this course, I've found through observing this exercise is that no students ever mention that a teacher is effective when students learn. Instead, I've observed that all EDU 510 students initially focus on teacher personality characteristics, but no students ever initially consider that teachers are effective if they maximize student learning. Throughout the course, I work with students to understand that teachers need to maximize ALL students' learning. Students work to understand learning theories such as Constructivist Learning Theory, Social Learning Theory, Multiple Intelligences Theory, and Experiential Learning Theory. I incorporate pedagogical practices that portray each into my own teaching so the EDU 510 students learn how to apply different  strategies and learning structures to their future instruction. For example, one of the assignments I've created for this class is called a Team-Teaching  Diversity Assignment. Instead of reading an entire text (Common Bonds: Anti-Bias Teaching in a Diverse Society), students in our class cooperatively read it by having different groups of students read assigned chapters in the book. Then, each group member is assigned a different task to complete as the group prepares to present their chapter to the class. In the past, students have mentioned that this was one of their most meaningful learning experiences because the assignment is designed with a cooperative learning structure while including elements of social learning theory and requires the use of technology. The assignment took a considerable amount of time to plan and write, but the time spent was very worthwhile. To view a copy of the assignment description and corresponding grading rubric, click here.

The second element of this class is to inquire into technology. As stated above, students come to this class with diverse educational and experiential backgrounds. Therefore, I was not sure how much technological expertise students had when they entered my classroom. I decided to administer a simple survey to better understand their background knowledge of one aspect of technology -- computer use. The survey is short and simple in design yet it provides me with a way to gain a wide perspective of the background knowledge students bring to this class and helps me to heterogeneously group students by technology ability when working in small group settings in the computer lab. I have been continually surprised to learn how little computer skills students have when beginning this course. Throughout the past two and a half years of teaching this course, students' prior knowledge remains relatively consistent: Over 60% of them have not used PowerPoint or any other presentation software for more than 1 year. Over 95% of them have little to no knowledge of web design and/or web authoring. Most students mention that they use the computer to create Word documents, to communicate through email and to surf the web. When I found this out, I knew I had much work to do. In class, students inquire into questions such as: Why implement technology into elementary classrooms? What purpose would technology serve? I discuss that technology is a tool used to complete tasks and the Internet can serve as a tool to gather and communicate information. In class, students learn to create a PowerPoint presentation and work to begin to create an online portfolio for their MST program. This takes a lot of out-of-class time for me because there are many embedded skills necessary for students to be proficient with such as knowing about saving and organizing files, folders and uploading information to servers that students initially find confusing. I consider it important to be available to help them so I work one-on-one with them often in computer labs throughout the semester. It takes a long time to sit next to someone learning how to save files and organize them into folders but I know that this is a valuable skill necessary to being an efficient teacher and I am dedicated to helping them become that. One way that I have worked to facilitate students' efforts in this area is to offer them the opportunity to either create a website from scratch using a free downloadable program called NVU or to use a template from Microsoft Publisher. I began to offer this option to my students in the Fall 2008 semester and all but one student chose to use the template. Overall, students were very pleased with the template's ease-of-use and overall design. Please click here, and here, and here to view a few different students' portfolios from Fall 2008. One of the goals I had in this area was to align students' portfolio requirements with  ACEI standards; From the previous students' portfolio examples, you will see how students need to align their artifacts to the standards. This semester, I am implementing the use of Taskstream templates for portfolio design. It seems effective and will help student data to be collected in a systematic way.

 I also spend some time in class discussing different ways that technology can serve to assist students with disabilities in classroom contexts. For many students in this class, they have not heard of this concept before. I talk about special education law and the necessity of providing assistive technology services and assistive technology devices for students with disabilities. For an example of a PowerPoint presentation that I use to facilitate this conversation in class, please click here.

The third element of this class is to inquire into educational research. Class discussions include inquiry into questions such as: What is educational research? Why do teachers need to know about educational research? and What kinds of educational research can help teachers improve their practice? Many students who take this class have little experience actually locating and reading articles from professional journals. I've learned that students need to learn how to distinguish different types of articles that are published in professional journals. In class, students spend time strengthening their abilities to read research. I provide them with a hand-out called Identifying Article Types that helps them to begin to develop an understanding of the different types of articles that they will encounter when reading professional journals. One of the assignments that students complete for this course is a Small-Scale Literature Review. For this assignment, students need to (1) identify an educational topic that interests them; (2) write an inquiry question that describes what they want to learn about their chosen topic; (3) use an on-line database to search for and locate five educational studies that corresponds well to answering their inquiry question; and (4) write up their findings as a small-scale literature review. I have found that this is an important activity for them because it requires them to distinguish different article types (because they need to locate studies) and it strengthens their abilities to read scholarly work. To help them learn to read scholarly studies, I've created a hand-out called
The Anatomy of a Study which helps them to understand how published studies are often organized. For an example of a student's Small Scale Literature Review, please click here. One of the long range benefits from this assignment is that students gain practice reading educational research which provides some background knowledge when they begin their Master's Capstone Project during their final semesters at Cortland.

Overall, I find this class extremely exciting to teach. While the title of the course includes the term 'Inquiry', I've added an application dimension by having students apply their knowledge gained from their initial inquiry into required course assignments. Students' evaluations of this course are overwhelmingly positive and I'm both pleased with the way I've designed the course and with the students' outcomes.