Unit 1: PLE Questions

First PLE Post Reflection:

1. What are your personal objectives for the class?

Becoming an art teacher has been a very long process for me. Getting into the program at UT has been a tough road, but I am finally getting to the point where I feel like this is really what I am meant to do with my life. My personal objectives for this class consist if gaining a better understanding of myself in the educational system. I want to gain knowledge about the ways in which I learn best, why my motivations are what they are, why I best focus in one setting versus another, how my teachers used tools and techniques to gain my interest, etc. By gaining this knowledge I hope to then be able to soon understand my own students needs in the classroom. I want to grasp the concepts of this course so that I can recognize when a student is behaving the way they are, so I can see when a student is struggling, why and how I can help them, and I want to be able to help them realize and reflect on their strengths and weaknesses inside and outside the classroom environment of learning.

2. What do you want to explore deeper?

I would like to explore the challenges I may face in the classroom. I find it very interesting that, as teachers in a varying of areas, we are all striving to get to know and understand our students so that we may best teach them. In this educational course, as well as in many of my other courses, I am surrounded by those who are in the art education program and those who are in another area of the educational program. While it will be good for me to hear how my peers in other programs will handle situations in their classrooms, I am interested in hearing what and how those in my area of teaching will conduct their classrooms. Educational psychology is applied to all areas of teaching, however, I believe that it is needed to be applied in a different way when working with math students versus working with art students. There are similarities, but I want to know how best to understand my students in the environment of my art education classroom. It will be new territory and maybe frightening to some students who feel as though they are not artistic and my hope is to better understand why, all the possibilities of how they may feel and act, so that I can accommodate to their needs for learning and succeeding in the art environment.