Nadia Williams

ITEC 7500: Capstone & Portfolio

Fall 2015
Standard 3.1

Standard 3.1: Classroom Management and Collaborative Learning

Candidates model and facilitate effective classroom management and collaborative
learning strategies to maximize teacher and student use of digital tools and resources.
(PSC 3.1/ISTE 3a)
Reflection:
In my years as a classroom teacher, I always strived to solidify my classroom
management skills as I instantly saw how they would support quality collaborative
learning strategies within my classroom. Thus, the reflection on the metaphor of
teaching I created as an assignment in my EDUC 8100 course in the Summer Semester
of 2014 serves as an appropriate artifact to illustrate my accomplishments with
Standard 3.1. My metaphor of teaching, in which I compared my classroom to a
corporation where I served as the CEO and my students as the employees, served to
create an illustration of how I approached classroom management from a holistic
standpoint.
In reflecting upon my metaphor, I extended it in order to illustrate how I saw my
classroom as a place that while I was at the head and had the final say on the general
direction in which we would go educationally, my students still had a voice. They would
work much like departments in some instances when I would differentiate for them
based upon their interests, strengths, weaknesses, or other factors. This metaphor
models how I facilitate effective classroom management. Furthermore, I stated
that I envisioned my classroom as being a place in which my students would be
encouraged to develop their educational autonomy. Doing so ensured that I would have
more time and energy to focus upon using a variety of digital and analog tools and
resources to support and enhance student learning. I furthermore stated that my
classrooms mission statement was that we would be forging ahead on our quest
toward lifelong learning so that we are always prepared to use our creative-thinking
skills to conquer any challenge we meet. In this veritable quest, my students and I
work collaboratively to learn how to maximize our use of digital tools and
resources as well to improve personally and, in my case, professionally.
I learned a lot about my personal teaching philosophy as a result of creating this artifact.
Since it is a reflection in and of itself, it already takes a look at what I would change
about my teaching metaphor. That said, in my reflection, I would have taken the time to
expand upon it more by having this metaphor become the basis of another research
study on educational models and classroom management strategies. For example, I
would have taken time to explore the Highly Effective Teacher Model by Susan Kovalik

and Associates and its use of brain-based learning in support of my overall metaphor
and views on education. I would also expand what I had learned as a result of this
more in-depth research and exploration to create blog posts for my professional blog
and on the one to which I contribute as part of my department. Furthermore, I would
love to use all that I would have learned as the basis for posts and articles to submit to
outside outlets within the educational industry such as Edutopia and EdSurge.
In creating this artifact, I realized that it acted as personal professional development as
I certainly found myself changing and, as a result, it had an impact upon professional
development within my corner of my school. This impact could be assessed by the
increase in my professional efficacy. This artifact also informed my contributions to
collaborative meetings with peers, and thus, became professional development for them
as well. This also had an impact upon professional development as I was also able to
translate my observations from my metaphor into professional development sessions I
have facilitated. Back within my classroom, my students did become more
academically autonomous which was fortified by the expectations my teammates had
upon them as well. I cannot say that my approach was the impetus for this impact, but I
was glad to see that my colleagues and I were working synergistically as was evidenced
by the parallel increase in our common assessment scores as observed at our quarterly
data team meetings.