Learning, Teaching and Virtual Classes

Hello everyone!

This blog will be all about my experience in reading Cluster 1 and my experience in our first virtual classroom. Our text Educational Psychology by Anita Woolfolk includes all the information we will need to become aware of the psychological development our students will be experiencing. The virtual classroom was a new adventure for me. I have never taken a course virtually before and am interested to see how it pans out.

For the CER for cluster one I read Audrey Amrein-Beardsley's article on highly qualified
teaching and it made me feel a bit angry. These policymakers are testing students with standardized
testing and are basing a teachers effectiveness on the student's score. "Test scores cannot capture
things like whether a teacher is caring, motivating, engaging, demanding, or has high expectations"
(Amrein-Beardsley, p. 2). I agree that our teachers need to be effective in order to give our student's
the best education, but the measurements the policy makers are using are ineffective in showing the
passion and emotion the teachers put into helping their students every day. Assessing the
qualifications of a teacher means acknowledging if the degree they received will work for the
classroom environment; meaning will the teacher be knowledgeable in the subject areas as well as
classroom management & etc.

I feel a teacher can be highly qualified and still have poor teacher-student relationships which
our text states as being a part of behavioral problems continuing into the middle school years. 
School performance and teacher-student relationships have a strong association with one 
another."The researchers concluded that the quality of teacher-student relationships in kindergarten 
(defined in terms of level of conflict with the child, the child’s dependency on the teacher, and the 
teachers affection for the child) predicted a number of academic and behavioral outcomes through 
the 8th grade, particularly for students with high levels of behavior problems” (Woolfolk, 2014, p. 
7). I think there are a lot of different personality traits, intellectual traits and classroom management 
skills that go into a teacher being highly effective and if our policy makers took into account these 
aspects as well as the student's scores we would have a very different education system.
     
Thanks!
       Lauren Ott