Teacher Candidate Dispositions Essay Cover Sheet

English Education Program

 

Teacher Candidate: ____Andrea Maimone_________________          Semester: Spring 2006           

 

Course (check one):  _ _ I: EGL449/CEF551   X  _II: EGL450/CEF552 ____ Seminar EGL 454/CEE590

 

Instructor:_______Prof. Michael LoMonico________                                 

 

What does it mean to be a professional, ethical English teacher?  What kinds of issues should good English teachers think about as they go about the daily tasks of planning, conducting and evaluating lessons?  How should they include others in their decisions about teaching and learning?  What approaches should teachers consider as important and sometimes difficult social issues arise as a result of class discussion?  These are difficult questions with no one right answer. 

 

To address these kinds of questions, several important educational organizations have developed documents, which we will work with in the English Education program:

 

·         The New York State Education Department’s “Code of Ethics”

·         The Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium’s Dispositions from their “Model Standards for Beginning Teacher Licensing and Development: A Resource for State Dialogue”

·         The National Council of Teachers of English’s “Attitudes for Teachers of English”

 

Directions to Teacher Candidates: In connection with the above documents, you have written an essay that responds to scenarios from English classrooms.  Please carefully examine your essay and list the numbers of the codes, dispositions, and attitudes to which your essay speaks.  In this manner, you will demonstrate your awareness of and your ability to address these points.  It may not be practical for every essay to speak to every code, disposition and attitude.  Since you will complete three of these essays in your work in the English Education Program, please pose as a goal for yourself that you will address each of the codes, dispositions, and attitudes at least once by the time you have written all three essays. This cover sheet and your essay should be included in your Teacher Candidate Portfolio.

 

 

	NYS “Code of Ethics”	INTASC “Dispositions”	NCTE “Attitudes”
Dispositions Essay Title:    Observed Dispositions of In-Service Teachers	1, 2, 4, 6	1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9	1, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Andrea Maimone

Dispositions Essay

Prof. LoMonico

EGL 440, Spring 2006

 

            In doing my field experience observations, I continuously found myself drawn to the style of one teacher in particular. In my opinion, he embodies everything I hope I will be for my students. He knows exactly how to balance fun with serious work and brings his students to new heights of higher-level thinking that simultaneously engage them and practice useful skills. He is not afraid to look to other teachers for support and collaboration in achieving his goals for his students and is not afraid to take risks in trying out new projects each year with each new group of students. He values students’ individuality and attends to those individual needs but not at the expense of their feeling as if they belong.

            I was fortunate to observe him as well as a few other teachers working on Shakespearean plays. From those observations, I was able to see exactly how this teacher, in particular, stood out from all the rest. In the other classes, I was seeing all the students being treated the same and teachers plowing through study guides, occasionally checking for understanding and complete sentences, but methodically plowing through all the same. This teacher had study guides too, but they weren’t traditional fill-in-the-blank type answers. They required students to make predictions, inferences, analyze scenes closely, prepare and perform soliloquies, consider relationships between Shakespeare’s words and modern-day English. In short, this teacher knew how to engage the students in higher-level, critical thinking while maintaining their individual creativity and giving them opportunities to “create” rather than “replicate and write complete sentences.”

            This teacher had also successfully built up a rapport with all the students and had a good, light-hearted, humor-filled relationship with all. This proved to be of great importance because, when the class went off track and he needed to be serious with them, the class immediately responded, recognizing that his seriousness was out of character and therefore “he meant business.” The humorous rapport he had with students and the ease in which he transferred those “inside jokes” to the material to draw the students in was admirable to me. Kids who would have slept through other classes or acted out were “performing Shakespeare” daily in his class with verve and enthusiasm. I think their behavior in his class had a great deal to do with his unwavering and high expectations of all his students and his refusal to let any of them fall through the cracks as “lost causes.” This teacher demonstrated his philosophy that all students are capable and have a right to learn on a daily basis and I firmly believe that many teachers can take him as a strong example of what good teaching is all about.