What makes great teaching?

 To name a few things, I think what makes a great teacher is being able to adapt to your students' strengths, creating a welcoming atmosphere that allows all students to share and participate, and incorporating multiple methods of learning strategies and teaching practices in the classroom. In this module we had to reflect on the types of strategies we used throughout the semester. Introducing multiple ways for your students to process information and reflect on what they learned is part of great teaching. Here are some strategies I found helpful throughout the course.

WordItOut

Doing a WordItOut means making a visual representation of the main ideas or takeaways from a reading or topic. For me the WordItOut really highlighted the important themes of our topic and it was easy to use the notes I took and see which words I used the most for the overall subject.

https://worditout.com/

Selecting Golden lines

Selecting Golden lines means finding a phrase or part of the reading that really stood out to you, and explaining what that means to you or why you find it important. For me, selecting golden lines made me pay close attention to the reading and write down several lines that resonated with me, so that I had a good understanding of what I read and multiple things to reflect on.

Text-to-World Connections from Empathy Limiting Mistakes

Text-to-world connections means finding ways in your personal life that you can make connections with from the reading. This was helpful for me because it made me reflect on how I can relate to what I was reading and interpret how to apply it in my own life.

Anticipation Guide

Using an anticipation guide means writing out notes and your thoughts/reflections before reading, during reading, and after reading. This was helpful for me to see my thought process throughout reading and how some of my perspectives changed or what new information I learned.

https://www.theteachertoolkit.com/index.php/tool/anticipation-guide

Blogging with other educators

Blogging with other educators means reflecting on questions relevant to the module and giving a response based on what we learned or took away from the module. This was helpful for me to read other educators’ responses and comments to get several different perspectives on how they answered the question.