Introduction
Course
Description and
Objectives - Portfolio
Purpose and Overview
Course Description
and Objectives
This course is centered around the study of theory
and research in psychology to facilitate the successful teaching of adolescents.
By the end of the course, students will have built a knowledge foundation
for success as a teacher. Specific objectives are:
• Acquire specific knowledge about adolescent learning, development,
and effective teacher student interaction in the secondary school classroom.
• Use knowledge of educational psychology to: perceive classroom events
as psychologically meaningful; plan, deliver, and evaluate instruction; understand
and solve teaching problems; and create safe and supportive learning environments.
• Understand the implications of students’ background and development
as they impact teaching and learning
• Acquire information about how gender, culture, language, and individual
difference affect learning and teaching of adolescents
• Become more aware of one’s own cognitive processes, attitudes,
assumptions, values, and beliefs, and their implication for teaching effectiveness.
• Apply principles of educational psychology to develop teaching practices
in fieldwork.
• Use multiple assessment tools and techniques to guide instructional
decisions.
• Become aware of journals, magazine reference works, and Internet sources
that provide information published for educators.
• Learn how to communicate and work constructively with students, families,
and community members to support adolescent achievement and well being.
• Learn when and how to access site based and community resources and
agencies in order to provide integrated support to meet the individual needs
to each student.
Portfolio Purpose and Overview:
This portfolio will
• display my fulfillment of this course’s objective
• allow me to reflect upon what I have learned about educational pyschology
and how I learned it
• show how I have begun to implement this knowledge in my classroom
• provide me practice in putting together a portfolio of my professional
work.
In this portfolio, I will provide reflections on activities and quiz performances followed by a rubric and evaluation for the portfolio. I have chosen three activities that were particularly enjoyable and helpful and two that were more challenging and difficult. First, I chose the webquest activity as it provided me with additional tools for developing online lessons, something I already enjoy doing. Next, I enjoyed the cognitive development lesson plan that prompted me to connect various methods I already used with cognitive development theories. The third of the best is my multiple intelligences lesson plan because it taught me to see many ways that I may teach a concept to my students while making my lessons more interesting and enjoyable. For the most challenging lessons I chose the WebAssign quiz and the self-designed quiz for chapters 3 through 5. Both of these I found to be very time-consuming, difficult work that resulted in only a superficial level of learning. Perhaps these two quizzes are not inline with my method of learing that happens best through reflection and application. After this, the quiz reflections will evaluate my performance on the quizzes as well as how beneficial they have been to my teaching. Finally, the rubric and assessment will display what I expected from this portfolio and how I feel I met those expectations.