Our Own Classroom culture and Standards!

EDUC 350
In class this week we discussed our own class culture and our mission for this class. It was very fun to talk about this with my classmates. In the end we came up with this semesters mission, " In EDUC 350 we will become better educators through immersing ourselves in diverse populations to better meet the needs of our students by creating a sense of community inside and outside the classroom." I think our mission for this class is awesome. Our mission as educators should always be to try to be better teachers for our students. We did a pretty good job on this mission statement. Being able to fully comprehend different types of diversity will give us a way to deal with different situations we might face inside our classroom. We also came up with a list of goals to achieve this semester some of which are; To get a good grade, to create and build a class culture; to be more confident and learn how to embrace all cultures; learn how to deal with hard situations; learn how to get to know your students as individuals; learn how to differentiate lessons based on circumstances; be aware of biases and keep them from affecting instruction. One of the goals that stuck out to me was the one about knowing our individuals because that ties in with NCTCS Standard 2c which states "Teachers treat students as individuals". This is something that we should take more into account so that our students don't feel like we are generalizing them. This week we also talked about how we should discuss diversity in class. We learned that we are the ones in our classroom that set the culture. Which to me was a little surprising because that is a lot of responsibility. 

EDUC 410
In class this week we talked about standards and how to use our particular subject standard and combine it with other subject standard. When our professor gave us the assignment I thought it was going to be very easy but it was more difficult to get all the standards to correlate on one specific topic. We also had a seminar about why standards are important. We all had pretty much the same opinion on the standards. They are a guiding light on what we should be teaching our students. For my outside research I found a website that talks about why standards are important and how they help us stay on track with the content we will need to be teaching.
https://www.greatschools.org/gk/articles/why-are-standards-important/

This week was full of information and I will take it all into my future classroom so that my students success is ensured. Being able to bond with my students as individuals will make them want to learn more and they might even like me enough to not give me a hard time (you know middle school kids). Having those standards there for me to have as a guideline will help me but also help my students understand why I am teaching them a certain topic. I am excited to learn so much more. I know that I will have to keep improving every skill I learn because every child is not the same and what works for some will not work for others.