Kayla VanEgmond's Annotated Transcript
A glimpse of each Master's course
Spring 2015
In this final course before I complete my Master in Education I have created this website as a synthesis and reflection of everything that I have done so far to earn this degree in education. Through this education class I have been able to work more with technology, including weebly, and create this portfolio so I am able to share my learning with the world. Unlike some of my other classes, my learning has been focused on how to present myself as a professional to my colleagues, parents, and employers, rather than just as a student to my professors. This course has forced me to update my resume, think about my learning as a professional, and reflect on the hard work and dedication I have put into becoming a better teacher, leader, learner, and colleague.
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Fall 2014
CEP 818 – Creativity in Teaching and Learning
Instructors: Dr. Rohit Mehta and Dr. Punya Mishra Course Website: CEP 818 CEP 818 was a course that allowed me to "play" - with concepts, ideas, and different ways of teaching concepts. In this course I picked a specific topic - using sports to creatively engage my students in science and social students. I created a weebly site in this class as well, which can be found in my showcase. It explains lessons and ideas that I created that would allow student to learn through creativity and exploration. These lessons would give students the change to practice tools that "spark" creativity, including perceiving, patterning, abstracting, embodied thinking, modeling, and finally, play.
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EAD 801 – Leadership and Organization Development
Instructor: Dr. William Arnold In this course my learning was focused on applying research about effective leadership to creating an action plan for change in my school. We started with identifying an adaptive challenge in our organization by focusing on an analysis of the school culture (amongst adults), the various perspective of people inside the organization related to that challenge, and the types of leadership used by central actors. Through each step of this analysis I used course readings about leadership styles and challenges to support my conclusions. The final paper centered on the action steps I chose to address the adaptive challenge, the ripeness of different individuals for change, and the quick wins I could use to generate momentum for the change.
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Summer 2014
EAD 824 – Leading Teacher Learning
Instructor: Dr. Nancy Colflesh In EAD 824 I learned about how to create and implement effective Professional Learning Communities. We researched and discussed different "designs" for this professional learning, including critical friends groups, classroom walkthroughs, and the tuning protocol. In the end, we created a plan and budget for professional learning at our school for the upcoming school year. This class gave me a lot of insight into the theories and hard work that goes into helping teachers learn how to learn better. |
EAD 867 – Case Studies in Educational Leadership
Instructor: Dr. Marilyn Amey and Dr. Eric Jessup-Anger This class had a rather different structure than the rest of the classes I took for my master's. In each section of the class, I read a set of scholarly articles about a particular element or elements of educational leadership. Then, I used what I had read to identify and address the leadership issues in a scenario corresponding to that section. Although there was some overlap in the topics, the structure was unique because each of the assignments was a distinct case study asking me to apply the readings to analyze that organization's challenges. This process of putting research into real (although simulated) life helped me make connections I would never have noticed between academic research and real world school experiences.
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Spring 2014
EAD 830 – Urban Education: Racial Achievement Gap
Instructor: Dr. Christopher Dunbar This was the most traditional of the classes in my MAED program. It was divided into two halves, the first focused on identifying, describing, and explaining reasons for the racial achievement gap, with the second focused on theories about what can be done to close it. Most of what I did in the class was read textbooks and scholarly articles about the achievement gap and then write papers using those texts to answer central questions in the field. I found reading a book about the efforts of Berkeley High School in Berkeley, CA to close the achievement gap to be particularly illuminating of the astounding complexity and difficulty surrounding this issue that is very personal to me.
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ED 800 – Concepts in Educational Inquiry
Instructor: Dr. Steven Weiland This class was designed as an introduction to the MAED program. Therefore, it was created to emphasize both the role of technology throughout the program and the different types of inquiry we would be using as students during later classes. I learned about the role of technology in education because it was my first entirely online class employing media of all types to engage, instruct, and provide feedback to students. Each of these technology-rich modules was centered around a different theory of educational inquiry, including being participant observers and using our own classrooms as an educational laboratory just like Vivian Paley.
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Spring 2012
TE 803 – Professional Roles and Teaching Practice II
Instructor: Justin Bruno I had the amazing opportunity to complete my student internship in Chicago. This was one of four classes that I took during that year while intern-teaching at Woodlawn Community School in the south side of Chicago. In this class we focused on teaching Social Studies and making sure the units and lessons align with the Common Core State Standards and are relatable to out students’ lives. I created an interdisciplinary unit focused on this question: How can you use folktales to compare African cultures and explore your own culture? The school I was working in was an Afrocentric School, so this unit was very fitting and supportive of the school’s goals in teaching African traditions and principles.
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TE 804 – Reflection and Inquiry in Teaching Practice II
Instructor: Judith Lachance-Whitcomb I had the amazing opportunity to complete my student internship in Chicago. This was one of four classes that I took during that year while intern-teaching at Woodlawn Community School in the south side of Chicago. In this class we focused on Science. I created an inquiry based science unit on earth science. The question we explored as a class was: How does the Earth change? My unit allowed students to question, investigate and explore, explain, and finally apply their learning. This class gave me the opportunity to explore the difference between experiences, patterns, and explanations and how inquiry and application flow between all three.
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Fall 2011
TE 802 - Reflection and Inquiry in Teaching Practice I
Instructor: Sara Snyder I had the amazing opportunity to complete my student internship in Chicago. This was one of four classes that I took during that year while intern-teaching at Woodlawn Community School in the south side of Chicago. In this class we focused on inquiry, creating three different projects centered around Language Arts. This class gave me the opportunity to create a unit, teach it, and then really reflect on the my own learning through the teaching, as well as reflect on how the teaching of the unit went and how it connected to the Common Core State Standards. This class showed me the value and ease in incorporating literacy into all subjects, rather than just keeping all subjects separated. I centered my interdisciplinary inquiry project on Language Arts and Social Studies, using Newspapers and Amelia Earhardt as my topics.
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