Kyle Pierre's ePortfolio

A City Tech OpenLab ePortfolio

Never ending, additional teacher responsibilities

Throughout my time as an educator to be, learning about the various responsibilities that teachers have in New York City never fails to blow my mind. As a baseline responsibility, teachers are expected to:

  • Create lessons and deliver instruction
  • Plan units and curriculum
  • Continuously assess and grade (and plan those assessments)
  • Learn about individual student personalities and needs
  • Stay engaged with parents, keeping them in the loop with the progress (or lack of) regarding their child.

I have also discovered that in New York City, teachers are required to do the following:

  • Have a period where they assist with the functions of the building
  • Mandatory bulletin board posting of updated student work
  • Help design or completely design their CTE (Career and Technical Education) programs for state approval

These long list of responsibilities make the job seem very intimidating and one can easily see why a teacher’s day is a lot longer than the typical school day of 8 to 2:30.  On top of this, teachers are also role models, counselors, and nurturers of the students before them. Every small interaction, choice of words, sequence of decisions or even the appearance of a teacher can impact the life of a student in a profound way. Even with the long list of these responsibilities, the moral reward from teaching is hard to get from any other job. Attached below is a series of notes I received from some of the students for Teacher Appreciation Week of 2018, with student names blurred to for privacy.

Creating Assessments

As part of my experience as a teacher as well as the content taught through college courses such as EDU 3630 – Assessing Student Learning Outcomes, I have been able to craft different kinds of assessments to measure what students have learned. My college classes as well as classroom experiences have driven the importance of continuous assessment home, as I never realized the importance until being in the situation. Assessment in all forms (formative and summative) is extremely crucial as an educator to help gauge the direction in which your classroom is heading, and if students are learning according to the objectives that you have set for the lesson. Learning how to properly craft test questions, as well as the components required for creating a “good” test have also been valuable to me as an educator. A final point that I would like to note that has also been important for me throughout the course of my career so far is sensitivity to learner characteristics when crafting tests. A good teacher must keep in mind the student demographic, language barriers, special needs, and cultural information about the students as each of these pieces of information are crucial when putting together tests.

 

Here is a sample of test questions created that will be used one day in a classroom, as a result of a project in EDU 3630.

Sample of test questions

Planning Units & Lessons

As part of their job, teachers are expected to plan instruction. Teachers are required to craft lessons and have a lesson plan to serve as a script that dictates how their lesson will flow. In New York City, public school teachers are contractually obligated to have a lesson plan on hand if requested by an administrator. Lessons that revolve around a bigger idea or concept are typically grouped into units, which teachers are also expected to plan and outline objectives for. During my Internship class (EDU 3681), I had the unique opportunity to be placed at The Young Women’s Leadership School of Astoria (TYWLS) teaching Computer Science and Web Design to 6th, 7th and 9th graders. One of my 6th grade classes was a class designated as an ICT (Integrated Co-Teaching) class, meaning that a certain amount of students in the class have special needs or disabilities to warrant the need of an extra teacher in the class to assist with instruction. Despite this requirement, my mentor did not have an additional teacher as the class was not considered a core class required for graduation.

I had the unique opportunity to design lessons and units for this class for the duration of the Spring 2018 semester. This experience was unique for me as I had never: 1) planned lessons and units to dictate the direction of multiple classes before, 2) incorporated accommodations for students with disabilities in my lesson plans in actual practice, and 3) seen the results of the instruction I planned impact students deeply. By the end of the semester, I had successfully taught all three classes how to create basic websites using HTML and CSS. My 9th grade class was even able to host an in-class showcase of their final project for the year which was to create a website for a local business. I was able to gather valuable information on how to teach various subjects within my field, with some lessons going excellently and other lessons going really badly. This feedback gave me valuable data for future classes that I will teach. When I re-plan these lessons, I will be able to remember what worked and what didn’t work and try to improve for my future students to understand. One example of a lesson that went bad was a lesson on ‘CSS Positioning’. The kids were not understanding the concepts trying to be taught, and we were not able to come close to meeting the objectives as a result of my delivery. I thought that I had a good lesson on paper, but it was a train wreck in person.

edu 3640 sample

 

Welcome to my portfolio!

This post is to commemorate my very first post on my OpenLab ePortfolio. Truth be told, OpenLab is a bit difficult to navigate and it took me quite some time to figure out how to invite other users to view this portfolio. It takes me equally as long (or longer) to figure out how to access the classes that use OpenLab to post material.

Here is a photo of the sunrise at Haleakala National Park.

Image result for sunrise

Welcome!

This is the first post on your Learning Blog. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

The ePortfolio is both a Learning Blog and an Academic Career Portfolio. Use the Learning Blog to document your learning experiences and class assignments each semester. As time goes by, add content to the Academics and Career sections to show your department, graduate institutions, or future employers how well prepared you are for your chosen career.

NOTE: Remember to add appropriate Categories and Tags to your posts. This will help your professors and other visitors find the content they are looking for. The Categories “Coursework” and “Field Trips” and the Tags “OpenLab” and “City Tech” have already been applied to this post. Feel free to make changes!