I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself as your instructor and facilitator for the course.
This class is organized into ten learning modules that loosely correspond to the ten weeks of the course. Each module is designed to be completed within a week, although the deadlines for the modules are more tied to the FOUR MAJOR assignments/assessments. It is important that you keep up with the learning, so as not to fall behind, and so as to contribute and collaborate with your fellow online learners. The syllabus explains this in more detail.
Over the past few months I've worked collaboratively with another faculty colleague and our university's instructional designers to create a course that is tied to the following objectives:
1. Understand the major traditions in educational research and how these can be used in understanding your classroom.
2. Be able to choose appropriate research designs in order to understand your school/classroom, and to situate your work within social-cultural and political contexts, in order to better understand your own teaching and your students' learning.
3. Understand how action research as a paradigm enables you, the teacher, to be able to advocate for the needs of your learners.
4. Locate, synthesize and critique available research in order to help you understand how your own classroom issues are part of a larger, global context of education.
5. Recognize, collect, analyze and interpret data that will help you meet your research question/inquiry, including the tools need for formative and summative assessment.
6. Understand the value of and participate in the communication of findings with colleagues or others to expand the global understanding of educational contexts.
These objectives may seem daunting, at first. However, my colleague and I have tried to create a course that will help you navigate through these objectives with exciting field-based assignments, reflective discussions with your peers, authentic assessments, and online learning activities. I encourage you to commit to fully engage in the experience, and I will commit to provide you with deep, reflective thoughtful feedback that will help you advance your understanding of yourself as a teacher and your students as learners.
One more picture to show the beauty of the lake...sailboats, sunset...this picture looks deceptively calm! But, the sailors were struggling against some strong winds, and their boat was in danger of capsize for about 20 minutes! Still beautiful. Enjoy!
