Final Course Reflection

 Education 438:

    This course has been very beneficial for me. The overall setup of this course allowed me to interact in a new way with not only my peers, but with the course materials as well. I thought that the assignments and the final inquiry project were really interesting and offered us some guidance on how to expand our own understanding and offer students more information and opportunities while they are in our classrooms.

    The assignments and inquiry project were really important for me to broaden my own understanding of my subject areas and how to support students in their educational journeys. The assignments modeled some of the tools that we learned about throughout the course, and showed us first hand how to model and use tools for critical thinking and understanding text. The inquiry project itself was an opportunity for me to explore specifically, how art can act as an interdisciplinary field with other content areas, and ways to apply concepts about analyzing and interpreting texts and media from this course.

    The strategies that I learned in this course will help me in my classroom to give students opportunities and give them agency with their learning. Some of the really important strategies that have been a focal for me throughout this course are: Think Aloud, Think Pair Share, and Talking to the Text. These three strategies are going to help students access metacognitive thinking and apply it in all situations. The discussion aspect of these strategies will allow students to access their schema and expand their understanding on not only art, but how art can be applied or used in other areas of learning or problem-solving in general.

Some of the key take-aways from this course are:

• schema (prior knowledge) can influence students' and teachers' understanding of information and being conscious of our biases and perspectives is essential for students to learn in a compassionate safe classroom
• student interest is important; their learning should not be based on a strict set of guidelines, rather we can try to give students the tools to build on the things they are passionate about to broaden their scope of understanding
• using tools and strategies that will allow students to have agency in their learning will motivate them to continue on their education journey