Standards Three and Four...Here We Go!

Class today was another whirlwind of information! All of it important and helpful, though. Today, our focus was once again on the NCTCS, and we covered Standards Three and Four.

Side note: today I learned there is actually a difference between the NCTCS and the NCPTS. In my last post, I talked about how we learned about the NCPTS (North Carolina Professional Teaching Standards) in class and how they formed the rubric with which I would be evaluated during student teaching. However, those standards I was referring to are actually the NCTCS (North Carolina Teacher Candidate Standards). While the NCPTS are the same standards, they are the ones that will apply to me when I am actually a teacher and in the profession.

Onward to Standard Three and Four!
So, Standard Three tells us that we need to know the CONTENT we are teaching. This is so, so important. After all, how on earth can you teach your students something you yourself don't know or fully understand? This also ties in with the fact that NC teachers are now going to be required to take Praxis II at some point during their first year of teaching, which is a HUGE change and definitely important to be aware of--this relates to Standard Three in that the Praxis II requirement will ensure that teachers know their content. In order to demonstrate that we know our content, we must be teaching what the SCOS (Standard Course of Study) says we are to be teaching, we must actually have the knowledge required to be a teacher, we must relate our content to other areas of study, and we must make learning relevant for the student. Relevancy is extremely important, because if you as a teacher can't make your content relevant for your students, then they will most likely lose interest and be less likely to learn what you need them to learn.

Standard Four, then is about being a facilitator of learning. What does is mean to be a facilitator? It means that you as a teacher must share the responsibility of learning with your students, rather than you attempting to be 100% fully in control of everything happening in the classroom at all times. You will be the one teaching, but you also need to allow students to think for themselves. In order to be a good facilitator, we must take the time to understand how each of our students think and learn, we must check frequently to make sure that our students are actually understanding the content rather than just throwing it at them and hoping for the best, we must assess our students using both formative AND summative assessments (meaning that we make sure we know that our students understand the information before we actually test them on it), and we must communicate with them effectively.

To end class today, we read through everyone's tweets they had been tweeting throughout class. At the beginning of class, we had been asked to tweet anything that stood out to us during class or that we wanted to remember using the hashtag "#educ316" so that we could find them all in one thread. Let me just take a moment to talk about how awesome this is. Not only is it a way to assess what has been learned, but it's also really fun, and Twitter is something most kids already know and love anyway. Also, it's a great way to integrate technology into the classroom, which is HUGE now, and in fact is part of Standard Four! It's a win-win.