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This is just a little background information on myself and who I am. I am a sophomore and the summer before this year I worked at a summer camp and decided that when I came back to school I was changing my major. I went from nursing to elementary education with a concentration in science. I knew I wanted a career that was all about helping others and knew this is where I needed to be. It has been an interesting experience going from a whole lot of medical classes to classes reared towards teaching children. I can say that this is the best decision I have ever made and I am very excited for my future as an educator.

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I feel like to really start this off it is important to talk about a few definitions that are very relevant to this course. Democracy represents our freedom and rights and is a system that is ruled by the people. Society is something that involves all of us and pushes us to live a certain way and it can be seen as unwritten rules of the world. Education is what we are teaching and how the students learn and is a very broad term. The developmental assets can be used to help define these terms because the developmental assets help make up these different definitions. We can also look at the thirteen principles of democracy to help us understand some things. The principles of democracy are put in place to help us have a democratic government. We need a democratic government so we can have say over what we do in education. These principles give us our basic rights and help us to inform education in the United States.

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When we first started this class we were instructed to make an info-graph  that consisted of information we needed to cover. The information included how is the United States school system organized, who makes the desicions about what is taught in our schools, and what types of schools we have in the United States and how are they funded. I remember doing this the night before it was due and scrambling to find information because I had no clue where to even start. I had a good start but throughout the semester we learned more about the questions asked and I was able to make a more accurate info-graph. (to expand click on picture)

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As we went more into detail about how our school systems are set up I made sure to take notes on what was going on so I could revise my first info graph. Looking through the two you can see I put in a lot more detail and the content is way more accurate. The biggest thing that really changed was my section about how the decisions are made and what really was put into perspective was how everything trickles down from the top. The example that stood out to me was talking about textbooks and how the government gives us different textbook companies we can use and then from there at the state level they make a textbook approved list and from there at the local level we get to choose what books we will use. This was a great activity for us because it was a way to test our knowledge about what we learned over the semester but we did it in a way that was fun to do and easy to comprehend.

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We did a lot of different activities with the developmental assets. For instance we made a Quizlet with all of the assets and we also made an asset based community. The Quizlet was a really great way to get the definitions to stick in my brain and also was a great study tool for the final. I really liked this activity because it gave me some freedom and let me arrange things in the way that I would most benefit from them. Making the asset based communities was a great opportunity for collaboration and creativity. Our group settled on making an actual community with buildings and decided on connecting two assets with each building and explaining why we chose them and what they would do to help enhance the community.

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A really cool activity we did was something to put into perspective the theory of product vs. process. Today in the field of teaching there is a lot of pressure on educators to teach students as much as they can to meet the standards and have them perform well on standardized testing. Because of this we often tend to skip over teaching students the process of how things are done and rush to get to the product. This can make things harder for students in the long run because they won't have well developed skills and will mostly just be obsessed with making a perfect product. As an educator I feel like it's important for me to understand this so I can make a difference and help students understand why it is important to focus on process rather than product. The activity that correlated with this theory was making a paper boat. We were told to try and make a paper boat and then from there we were able to use different sources to try and learn the proper way to make the paper boat. We then went and put our boats to the test to see if they could actually float and then wrote about the process we went through to get to the final product.

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This was an activity that was a little different for me. This took a lot of concentration and some creativity. It was hard to go through each standard and rewrite each one in my own words. I am really glad we did it though because as a future educator it's very important for me to know the standards and know them in a way that's easy for me to comprehend. It's also important because I will be using these for as long as I am an educator.

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I feel like a very important part of this class was discussing diversity. A way we discussed diversity and it's impacts was talking about the trend of players kneeling in the NFL and why they were doing it. Children look up to these people and it's important to be able to talk to them openly about it. Diversity is kind of seen as a taboo in the education setting and it's time to bring light to it. We need to make children feel more comfortable with who they are and it's our job to help cultivate that self-confidence. It's important to be comfortable talking about this subject and promoting this. I can use the discussions we did in class and also talking about the trends in the news to help me with my confidence in the field and also to be able to recognize certain situations that might not be okay. It's always important for your students to feel like they are safe and able to be themselves so that means we need to make a space that is filled with love and acceptance.

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This discussion was very interesting and informative. As a teacher it is important to know about different teaching strategies to make the learning more fun and memorable. It was fun to come up with our own strategies and also discuss teaching strategies we would use in our own classrooms and what the disadvantages and advantages of those would be. A particular one we did in class was the students becoming the teachers. It was very interesting because we all became experts on our particular topic and then we were able to make a presentation and a way to assess our students and able to share our knowledge with the class. It was a really fun experience and a good way to help your students with confidence by them becoming the experts and making it easier for them to talk about that certain subject.

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This is something I wanted to save for the end because it really had to biggest impact on me. What made this different than any other volunteering experience I had was the reflections. The reflections were really a way for me to look back on everything I had done that week and put new things into perspective. It also helped me remember the 40 developmental assets better because in some of the prompts we were asked to connect some of the assets to our field experience. This was an amazing opportunity and it really gave me a taste of what it will be like out in the field. There is really nothing better than seeing the children light up with interest and enthusiasm when teaching about new things. I am so grateful for this opportunity I was given because of this class.

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If you would of told me this time last year I was going to completely flip from nursing to education I would have said you were crazy. I can say I have never been happier with a decision. I am so ready to be an inspiration to my students and cultivate a classroom of acceptance and self-love. I am so excited for every thing that lies in front of me and am so thankful for this class. It is a great way to ease into this major and makes you feel very comfortable about the next steps.