For my first professional
development event I attended the K-16 World Language Instruction: Preparing
students for the next level and beyond. This event took place on November 1st
and it was held at Grand Valley. At the event there were several speakers and I
learned a lot about different techniques I would like to use in my classroom.
There were three specific items that I thought stood out the most from the
speakers that day. The first thing is using stories in order to teach a lesson. The example given was about a tree’s using
humans as their Christmas trees, one of the younger trees asked what happens to
the humans when they are done with them and it was explained that they are just
thrown out. The moral of the story was that we should not just cut down trees
to decorate and then throw away but the story was created to make the students
more interested and show the situation from the trees perspective. This gave me
a new idea for my future classes to make the learning more interesting.
The second
big idea of the presentation was similar to the topic above in that it was
about making the learning fun and also teaching students the needed
information. This is something that I think about every time I create a lesson
plan. The speaker discussed how students learn and comprehend more when the
lesson is exciting and fun. When the lesson is fun the students become more
engaged and this helps them to understand the material better.
The third
important thing I learned from the professional development seminar was another
way to help the students remember material better. The presenter spoke about
how if you want your students to remember information such as the states of the
country to not give them a map already filled in but rather a blank one. She
explained that giving the students a blank map requires them to fill it in
themselves and therefore helps them to remember the material better. This
learning strategy does not just have to do with remembering geography but I can
translate this to even remembering vocabulary words and not just giving them to
my students but having them fill in the information themselves.
Overall I
thought this experience was very helpful and provided me some with some great
strategies for my classroom. I think that attending events like this can be
very helpful and provide me with other teachers’ experiences and strategies that
I can implement in my class. The strategies I learned from the seminar I think
will be a great addition to my future class.
