Jay's AEDU 335 Blog

As we near the end of this course, this week's reading was a refreshing surprise with us only being required to read one piece of writing instead of the usual two. This week's reading were pages 33-44 in our AMLE This We Believe book. The main theme of these pages being the importance of culture and community characteristics in junior high schools and the effects on their students.  To go into more detail these were the things discussed in the writing: school environment, adult advocates, guidance services, health & wellness, family involvement, and community & business. Having a good school environment is all important. Students want to feel safe, welcomed and wanted. Having adult advocate is also an important thing for students and can go beyond teachers, whether they are counselors, coaches or other school employees. Guidance counselors are also important, and often overlooked, because they are specialize professionals who are more fit to aide the students' em...

Hello everyone! It's spring break for me, which means extra time to read this week's articles! The theme of this week's reads was differentiated instruction. Simply put, differentiated instruction is an educational philosophy that allows for more flexibility for student learning based on different types of lessons and learning and student interest. Differentiated instruction is not to be confused as attempting to create an individual lesson plan for every single student. In today's educational landscape, that would be near impossible just because of the sheer number of students each teacher has. I feel that as time goes on, differentiated instruction is starting to take front stage in the classrooms of the future. It definitely is being taught more to new teachers. I can say this from personal experience because this is not the first time I have learned about this interesting concept. UPDATE: I just finished watching one of our assigned movies for the week. The movie ...

We are at the halfway point already, fellow AEDU 335 students, can you believe it?? In this week's reading, one theme popped out at me: leadership. In a nutshell, both articles assigned this week focus on the leadership of a school and its effect on all aspects of school, especially teachers and students. In these articles, we took a closer look on what effective principals do better than ineffective ones. To condense these already long readings, it was these things I found in common from both readings: teamwork, learning environment, and professional development. Teamwork between educators and administration keeps everyone on the same page, and helps pave the way for a smoother education for the students. Learning environment and culture are also big things. If the work environment is toxic for the teachers it will in turn be the prelude to a toxic environment to the students. Finally, professional development is key for creating effective educational establishments. My personal...

Another week in the book for AEDU 335! This week's readings and activities were, once again, very interesting. In this post, I will be focusing on the multiple intelligences for a handful of reasons. Some of them are the fact that it is one of my favorites and it was a big part of this week's readings and assignments. For those currently in the Trinity Adult Program I do not need to delve too deeply into defining it since we covered in this past winter in AEDU 303: Education Psychology. For those who happen to stumble upon this somehow, the multiple intelligence theory basically states that there is no such thing as one all-encompassing intelligence. All people are both alike and similar but never completely the same. Everyone is good at certain and struggle with others and that's the basis of that theory. It should not be confused with how to learn or learning styles. Of the assignments we had this week, I found " Big Thinkers: Howard Gardner on Multiple Intellige...

This first week's reading has been quite interesting. A lot of things definitely are clicking with the readings, and they definitely go hand in hand with the things I have been learning in my junior high science methods class. For instance, in the This We Believe text, it speaks of the rapid changes that preteens undergo in the ages of 10-15 years. These changes are not only physical but emotional and mental as well. In AEDU 368 we learned, though young, the students do not want to be treated as children like in grades K-5. Most of what I read in the AMLE text was just a refresher of what I have covered earlier in the semester. What was most interesting to me was the other assigned reading, "Middle School- The Emergence of Middle Schools, Growth and Maturation of Middle School Environments". For starters, I had no idea that middle school and junior high were different things at one point, I just thought they were synonyms for grades 6-8. It was very interesting to read ...