This week's readings included, Brown Chapter 9-11 and Kumar Chapter 13.
Kumar discusses the importance of monitoring one's own teaching acts. This, as he states includes, closely observing classroom events and activities, analyzing the classroom input and interaction and overall, evaluating instructional objectives and outcomes critically. He later discusses product and process oriented models. While product-oriented models of classroom observation assumes that a description of teacher behavior is needed to build a classroom behavior profile of the teacher, instead the process-oriented approach of observation assumes that the classroom activities are need to be interrupted to understand the classroom processes and practices. This helps us understand the things that are going on in our classroom, do you agree?
Brown discussed curriculum design in one of his chapters, including program evaluation which he states is essential. Brown states that two of the program evaluations are implied in a course, one of the teacher and one of the program itself. It is important to note that the students, teacher and the program are all interdependent, so while it is important to evaluate the teachers, it's important to know it is only one factor and an effective program evaluation needs to consider all three factors.
Kumar also discussed, that whatever the observation system may be, it meeds to be user-friendly which means offering them open-ended possibilities and user-friendly procedures in self observing, analyzing and evaluating themselves as teachers. the system being user friendly really is key, but how do you believe this is possible? What does being user-friendly entail?
At one point during Kumar's chapter, he discusses multiple perspectives in classroom events and how the multiple perspectives and pedagogies of teaching coming together may affect the perceptions of what happened in the classroom and how the teacher teachers. What do you think of this?
Brown also discusses lesson planning in this week's readings which breaks down the format of a lesson plan, guidelines for the actual planning of the lessons and provides a sample. The guidelines were very interesting to read. Which of the guidelines did you find most important?
Brown also mentions making lesson plans take into account the variation in students. We know our students abilities will vary, and we should consider this when planning lessons though some of the techniques provided on page 169. What type of individual differences can you think of between students that you should consider?
