Goodbye to EDU 100

Education is like a room full of doors. Behind each door contains a different way to teach and to experience learning. Throughout our careers as teachers, we must open each of these doors so we ourselves can learn the best ways to teach our students. There are many approaches and philosophies to teaching that may take years to try out, but all of them are available to us.

What I have learned from this Education class is that teaching can happen anywhere. It can happen in a traditional classroom or outside in our own environment. Learning can take place in the woods or in our own backyards, like in Environmental schools, or in classrooms where students are more hands-on, like in Montessori schools, or in schools where learning derives from the child's own questions and thoughts, like in Homeschooling or Unschooling.  Also, behind each of those doors is a way to accommodate all students, whether they are gifted, disabled, or if they are just learning to speak English.  With the help of IEPs and advanced placement classes, students with disabilities and giftedness can be accommodated. Also, with mainstreaming, all students can be brought together in one classroom as they would in real life.  Lastly, from this class I learned the different kinds of philosophies and the one I that I would be most successful using, which is Cognitivism.  Although I do not plan on teaching, I can take this information with me in my own profession.  Learning about the different kinds of schools were especially eye-opening for me.  Because of that lesson, I have become more involved with the homeschooling community in Peabody.  I have reached out to them and offered the Peabody Institute Library as a place for them to meet, and I have also offered any materials that we have here as supplies for their learning activities.

This has been the first class that I have blogged in and the first that relied a lot on the posts and comments of other students.  I have really enjoyed this type of communication with my classmates, especially because we are an online class and would have never been able to communicate otherwise. It is nice getting feedback by our classmates and being able to see other perspectives than our own. By reading blog posts and other assignment posts, I always took something new away from every assignment, something that I didn't notice during my own reading. Overall, I was happy to post online with my classmates each week.