Reflection 6: June 27, 2012

I read the PP for this class, and I liked the slide for "students actually retain".  This slide was interesting because it is a reflection of how I personally learn.  I learn best when see and hear something, then I tell others what i have learned or actually do something to show that i have learned.  During my undergraduate years, i hated my lectures in which nothing happened by the professor was talking.  The most difficult part was that the professor was only sometimes actually discussing the topics mentioned in our textbook, while spending most of his time tellign us about his research.  while this was interesting, it was difficult to deal with because the tests in class were only based on the text.  He assumed everyone understood everything, and if they did not, they had a TA to answer questions.  Sometimes the TA did not speak english or, because they were not trained to be teachers, they had a difficult time teaching us.  All of this should be a lesson for us as educators, if we do not learn this way, then how can we expect our students to learn by reading or listening to us all day.

This lecture was so incredibly helpful!  differentiation is so important to me, and hope I will be able to achieve success with it when I start teaching.  I loved the part about choosing a product.  I feel that so much of how i think about this part of differentiation is dictated by how I was taught years ago.  This is not applicable in today's classroom (and never should have been back then either).  I also found Tomlinson's Planning model helpful.