Synthesis Essay

Investigating and Improving Educational Practices

My first course in Michigan State University’s Master of Arts in Education (MAED) program was about educational inquiry. Educational inquiry can take place through many lenses: philosophy, biology, psychology, history, narratives, and ethnography. I imagine myself engaging in educational inquiry as I step back from the hubbub of the classroom and use these lenses to examine what I see taking place. I am a scientist looking through a microscope at the tiny particulars of a class, an assessment, a reading strategy. I am a scientist gazing through a telescope at the broad horizons of education with its many contextual factors. Each of my classes in the MAED program has helped me to look more closely through multiple lenses at an aspect of education: classroom management, literacy, curriculum, special needs. Now in my last course in the MAED program, I again take a step away to look at the big picture of what I’ve been learning and what I hope to investigate next.

Since I took just one course per semester, my classroom really could be a laboratory. I could both examine education in my classroom through the lens of the course I was taking and also observe how adjustments, made based on course ideas, impacted it. In this way, the program helped introduce me to a steady stream of changes and improvements to make to my classroom and my teaching practice. There are many ways that the MAED program shaped my views and actions. Four main ways are these: I am more willing and able to make big changes to my teaching; I consider and evaluate my teaching views and practices through more lenses; I see it as my responsibility to be a leader in areas in which I am developing expertise, and; I view the education system as imperfect, complex, and ever-changing, and therefore I view it as imperative to keep learning and changing myself.

I will be discussing three courses that especially demonstrate how the MAED program shaped me in these ways.

These three courses offer meaningful examples of the ways I have grown and changed.

Counseling, Education, and Psychology (CEP) 883,

Psychology of Classroom Discipline:

This course helped me to look at the way students’ educational experience is influenced by classroom management, specifically through the lens of psychology.

Teacher Education (TE) 846, Accommodating Differences in Literacy Learners:

This course considered how literacy education must take place with differentiation and best practices in order to meet the needs of all learners.

Teacher Education (TE) 822, Issues of Culture in Classroom and Curriculum:

This was the course I most enjoyed and learned from during my time in the program. It looked at the various cultural factors that play central roles in shaping the education system, and therefore the experience of teachers and students.

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Each course in the MAED program challenged me with new ideas, both theoretical and practical. Yet not only did the courses challenge my mind, they challenged my actions. They encouraged and pushed me to implement changes and gave me the reasoning and resources to do so. One example of how my time in the program has been an impetus for change comes from the Psychology of Classroom Discipline course. This course propelled me to create some informal Behavior Intervention Plans that allowed me to discuss and address student behaviors with particular students. For example, a student and I created a Behavior Intervention Plan to track the times he left his seat (this was happening continually), and he was able to recognize and change this behavior. The course also gave me new ideas for how to build relationships with students, a key part of classroom management. One idea I implemented after taking the course was asking students to list or name topics they especially enjoyed learning about. I then made extra effort to include many of these topics in our learning throughout the year.

Willing and Able to Make Big Changes

Introduction

Another example of how the program challenged me to make changes comes from the Accommodating Differences in Literacy Learners course. One aspect of literacy that we discussed in this course was writing. When discussing best practices, I learned that most grammar practices are not helpful and can actually hurt growth in student writing. Learning this prompted me to drop most of the grammar exercises I used and update the few that aligned with best practices. We also discussed using inquiry activities as a basis for writing. I therefore developed several lessons that began with inquiry, such as a second grade descriptive writing project about seashells. Changes such as these happened continuously in each course and across the program. As I learned, I use my new knowledge and resources to change, like a scientist would use results of previous experiments and studies to improve future work. This pattern of being willing and equipped to make changes is one which is now a habit and so can continue to impact my teaching for years to come.

Able to Evaluate Views and Practices with Multiple Lenses

Because of the variety of courses I took, I have also been able to look at education generally and my own practices through multiple new lenses. The clearest example of this comes from Issues of Culture in Classroom and Curriculum. This course taught me to look at classroom practices, ideals, and curricula through lenses of anti-racism, anti-colonialism, raciolinguistics, queer, anti-sexist, and social justice pedagogies. A specific example was examining how I label students. I sometimes used the labels “boy” and “girl” to have students line up, form groups, or create teams. This course made me rethink how my labeling could negatively impact students with gender dysphoria. Another small example was adding a layer of consideration to each and every text I use to make sure it is inclusive, does not stereotype characters, does not misrepresent history, and represents the experiences of my students. On a larger scale, the course challenged me to look at the topics I choose to teach and the ways I teach them to ensure I am teaching in equitable ways.

Another example of how the MAED program has given me new lenses to examine my teaching comes from the “Accommodating Differences in Literacy Learners” course. This course helped me to use the lens of best practices in vocabulary instruction to reevaluate the ways in which I teach vocabulary. By considering all my teaching practices through the lens of how students best learn vocabulary, I was able to identify areas for improvement. Likewise, the course challenged me to use a lens which views components of literacy as very interconnected. Using this lens, I could identify how the way I sometimes taught phonics patterns was isolating and not as effective as it could be if better integrated with other aspects of literacy. As each course gave me new lenses to reexamine my practices and curriculum, I built habits of using these lenses to make better decisions and to improve as a teacher. Those lenses will continue to inform my teaching choices.

My students examine owl pellets to try to determine what the owl ate for lunch!

Challenged to Lead in Areas of Expertise

Both the changes I have been able to make and the lenses I now use to continue evaluating and making changes are an impetus to my third area of change: I now view myself as a leader in some areas and therefore see it as a responsibility to offer leadership and resources to other teachers. I took the Issues of Culture in Classroom and Curriculum course during a fall semester, which means that Thanksgiving fell within that time. The course offered an abundance of resources which benefited both my own knowledge and my teaching of Thanksgiving. Yet I see most of my students for 30 minutes or less a day. With the new knowledge I have, I felt I could not excuse myself from staff-wide conversations about teaching about Thanksgiving. I therefore shared resources with colleagues through an email and also jumped into conversations in the break room and elsewhere when the topic arose. I was able to lead both by example and through intentional sharing to help myself and colleagues teach Thanksgiving in a more culturally appropriate and sensitive way.

Similarly, in my course on literacy learners, one text we read was about describing English Language Learners (ELLs). It discussed many factors that can help us describe these learners and how those descriptors impact them as literacy learners. Since most of my experience has been with ELLs, this is an area where I already have many resources and knowledge. I was able to add the information I learned through this text and use this combined knowledge to begin to co-lead a series of trainings for the teachers in my school on teaching ELLs. I have realized if I learn something, such as how to better teach about Thanksgiving or how to best teach ELLs, but I see that this is not common knowledge or that best practices are not being used, it is my responsibility to myself, my colleagues, and my students to share what I know and encourage change in others, too. Having the formal backing of graduate classes and texts gives me both the confidence and pressure to do so. In other words, now that I have lenses which allow me to see areas for improvement, I need to share those lenses and help others grow, just as I hope they do for me as well.

In addition to co-leading training for colleagues, I have led several family nights for EL families.

Viewing the Education System as Complex and Imperfect

Lastly, examining the education system both broadly and in all the day-to-day particulars of my school and my classroom has led me view education as even more complex than I previously thought. As the saying goes, “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” Furthermore, realizing the intricacies and complexities of education highlights how often our educational system has erred and continues to err. Again, this was clearest to me in the Issues of Culture in Classroom and Curriculum class. As the course exposed me to new lenses with which to evaluate the education system, it became clearer and clearer that this system has long failed all students, and especially students of color and students from non-dominant language or cultural groups. It has failed by shaping itself around a White, wealthy, heterosexual, colonizer view of what good education is, what and how history (and all subjects) should be taught, and what a model student should look like. This has been to the detriment of all students, as we have pushed important topics and problems out of view. Thankfully, this course also demonstrated how education is always changing. There is so much new research, leadership, and resource-development on how to make schools a place for all students to succeed while also addressing hard and complex truths. The ever-changing nature of education is therefore an encouragement.

Conclusion

Since the education system and the wider society it is part of is always changing, we as educators and educational leaders have the opportunity to improve. Even though education is so complicated that we often fail or fall short, we also have the ability to continue to shape and improve the education system. I have the ability to do that starting, practice by practice, to make changes in my classroom and in myself. I can use the new lenses I have to identify areas for change, to be a leader for change, and thereby to have a positive impact on the education of students.