The Love of Learning... A Personal Reflection

As I come closer to completing another module of IICT Part 2, I need to reflect on my learning experiences thus far... Here are my musings!

1. Describe one significant idea or issue that has arisen for you as you were engaging in the topics during the Learning Experience:

There seems to be a common thread of what is effective Professional Development for teachers with regards to technology integration. Authentic training needs to be ongoing, focused, and job embedded. Too often, training is a gloss over set of strategies that aren’t focused on staff needs, but more to meet an agenda item of broad school goal. In our classrooms, we are supposed to meet the diverse needs of our students by providing differentiated opportunities to sustain inquiry and challenge thinking. We should be able to help students make connections with curricular goals and real life situations and challenges… yet, we rarely apply this to teacher learning. Instead, we often force a one-size-fits-all methodology and expect that everyone can reproduce, while still meeting the needs of all their students with a constantly changing set of tools.

2. Elaborate on how specific resources, ideas or experiences in the learning experience have contributed to your learning. e.g. reading material, course activities etc:

I think for me, the challenge is getting my ideas out. I like to share… in person. I’m a talker. I like to meet the people I work with and find out what they like, the type of person they are, and how I can help them. The online tools and activities, seem a bit impersonal, and I can’t share what I know as effectively in this environment.

3.Share how your participation in the discussion forum has contributed to your learning and connect that to your understanding of the Standards of Practice for the Teaching Profession.

The sharing of tools and strategies specific to teaching and learning show a commitment to students and student learning. Any AQ course we take is for the purposes of furthering our knowledge, skills and abilities to meet the needs of our students. We demonstrate the love of the learning process by taking courses and demonstrate our resilience in learning more. Teaching is purposeful and if we as teachers fail to grow as learners, we aren’t modeling the love of learning to our students.