Appendix Section 2: Core Courses in Curriculum & Instruction

Section B: EDCI 786 Teaching & Learning

This course focused on engaging learners in the classroom. Throughout this course,
students (educators) created an engaged learning portfolio that highlighted best teacher
practices for engaging students with the content the educator taught. While compiling the
portfolio, educators were reflecting on their classroom practices and scoring their skills with
student engagement based on a rubric provided in the course. This rubric helped educators
highlight areas of concern or needs improvement, and it helped foster discussions on what
engaging lessons each educator was doing in their own classrooms. This course also required a
contemporary book study which provided educators in this course with another source of
engaged learning materials and acted as a means of self-reflection for the educators.
Throughout this course I did a lot of self-reflection on my teaching practices and their
effectiveness/impact on student learning and engagement. As an educator, I believe that I
create and utilize engaging lessons for my students, and this course reinforced those
techniques I already was using in my own classroom. I also learned some new techniques and
strategies in this course, which I started to implement in my lesson plans. Something that I
discussed in length during this course was the transition I was going to be making after I
completed the course I was a middle school (6th and 7th grade) social studies teacher, but I am
now a high school (9th and 10th grade) social studies teacher, so I spent a lot of time discussing
how to adapt the engaging practices I used with middle school level students for use with high
school level students. Finally, the independent book study provided me with skills to create a
better mindset as an educator and how to promote that better mindset in my students. I chose
the book Innovators Mindset by George Couros for this book study, and through the book I
learned more about the concept of growth mindset (i.e. the innovators mindset), and I
have been able to translate that knowledge into my classroom environment. Just by changing
the phrasing I use when interacting with students (focusing on growth mindset phrasing) has
made an improvement in my students engagement and performance in my classroom.