Week 2 Blog

From the start of our Education 316 class until now, Dr. Clark has provided us so much material that will be helpful to us in our future classrooms. We have learned what a Candidate Learning Community is, and what it is constructed of, and lastly we have learned how to come up with an effective mission and vision for our classroom. I have learned that a Candidate Learning Community (CLC) is very important for success in schools nowadays. A CLC involves mostly just faculty members, but on rare cases such as when you are talking about a policy) there can be both administrative and parental involvement. When working within a CLC in your school, you do not need to just become comfortable within your own department, because CLC is all about collaboration, and figuring out 'what is the most effective way to enhance my students learning,' so within these CLC meetings, you will be able to gain both knowledge and understanding from your peers on the most effective way to teach a subject to your class. If you cannot already tell, the main idea that needs to be the center of every meeting is to "Help student learn." If we keep this our main goal, then everything should run smoothly. Within the CLC you have to have 5 main ideas that help you to achieve the goal of Improving Student Learning. The first one is Mission; you as a teacher need to set a mission that you would like to see happen within your classroom setting and also with your students. Secondly, provide a vision statement; it is also imperative to figure out how you are going to accomplish that mission and put it in a statement. Next is Values; make sure that your values are known within your classroom so that everyone will be respected. The fourth one is Goals, make a list of goals that you want to achieve throughout the year and hang it up in the classroom so that your students may have a visual of what they are expected to achieve. Lastly, develop Class Norms, come up with important rules and have them placed throughout your classroom so that the students know how they are expected to act at all times. So far this class has taught me how imperative it is to be a leader within the classroom (NCPTS Standard 1) and also how we need to establish a respectful environment for a diverse population of students (NCPTS Standard 2). The last thing that we did in class today was we came up with a personal mission and vision statement, then we came together as a class and agreed on  a mission and vision statement that we all wanted to achieve. This class has taught me a lot so far, and i cannot wait to learn so much more!