Student Teaching Seminar — On-line

Comps. Study Questions

Here are the course units:

Study questions for MAT comprehensive exams — each of these areas and issues would be smart things to study

Foundations

1. Discuss your philosophical beliefs about education and connect them to what other smart people have said about education (other philosophers, other philosophical theories). Do a little name dropping here and give examples from your life and teaching experience.
2. Another questions will likely ask you to discuss how schools serve society through recreating social norms. Potential things to mention here are culture of power, hidden curriculum, and social justice issues - power, oppression, and so forth. All in the name of educating a pluralistic society, of course! Always give examples from your life and teaching experience.

Computer class

1. Be prepared to talk about how you would use technology tools to support teaching and learning in your classroom. Be prepared with specific technologies and specific lessons or activities that would teach core subject matter ideas - just supported with technology resources. Think about all the great things you could do with consistent, high-speed web-access!
2. Be prepared to talk to both sides of the technology in education debate - describing both the positives of technology in education as well as the negatives or drawbacks. You must provide a fairly balanced view, however, as too far afield in either direction seems over zealous!

Multiple Intelligences and Multiculturalism

1. Have good descriptions for both multiple intelligence theory and multiculturalism including why a person might want to use them in conjunction with one another.
2. Have a sense of equity pedagogy and be able to connect your life experience and teaching experience to these issues to support your ideas.

Special Populations Seminar

1. Understanding common traits of students with learning disabilities and having a cascade of pedagogical strategies to support students with special needs in the regular classroom.
2. Articulate differences between accommodations and modifications as well as some stories or examples from your practice. Basically, be able to talk in smart ways about how to support special needs students in your regular classroom.

Critical Literacy and Metacognition

1. Basically, be able to talk about how you will support struggling readers in your regular classroom setting. Talk about particular strategies or models of instruction that would support struggling readers - reading guides, KWL charts... other things like this?
2. You should probably look for ways to connect to existing theory, theorists, or models that support integration of literacy into daily subject matter instruction.

Curriculum and Planning: Teacher Work Sample Methodology

1. Be prepared here to discuss how the work sample process helps you to systematically connect your teaching actions with the learning of students. Discuss sensitivity to context, articulation of rationale and connection to standards, discuss smart lesson planning, and documentation of the value-added by your teaching (pre test and post-test data), and analysis and reflection on that data for the purposes of investigating your effectiveness.
2. You should probably know something about different models of instruction - cooperative learning, simulations, direct instruction... and something about the strengths and weakness of these models as well as something about how your experience relates to these models and issues.

Classroom Management

1. Discuss the underlying tenets of at least one (preferably two) models of classroom management or discipline. Strengths and weaknesses of each and how you see the model and its effects playing out in your classroom.
2. Be prepared to discuss your personal classroom management plan, how it is informed by what other smart people have said about classroom management (theories and theorists) and how your management considers existing student differences (in ability, language, SES... or whatever).

Integrated Methods

1. Discuss pros and cons of integrated curriculum. Have some examples of how you have integrated curriculum and to what effect. Talk about a couple of different models of integration.
2. Perhaps have thought through a unit of integrated instruction and talk about the pros and cons of teaching in this way.

Assessment

1. Be prepared to talk about key characteristics or qualities of excellent classroom assessment - how to make sure you get good data, alignment... how to run a smart assessment program in your class.
2. Talk about differences between large scale, high stakes assessments and the tests teachers design.
3. Have lots of good examples from experience! Oh... perhaps consider how to write good scoring guides and rubrics - that might be a good question!

Teacher as Researcher

1. Be prepared to have the quantitative versus qualitative debate in terms of their goals, their methods (survey vs. thick description or something like that), and their dispositions toward truth and objectivity. Also have something to say about action research - what it is and how you might use it.
2. You might wish to consider a scenario in which you are given a school problem (like tardiness) in which you have to design an action research study to try to learn about and then solve the problem. So... what goes it to planning a research study basically.

Adolescent Psychology

1. Be prepared to talk about a couple of different theories of adolescence - from the perspectives of Piaget and Erickson maybe? Be prepared to talk about social, cognitive, and physical development in adolescence.
2. Also, be prepared to talk about how issues of adolescence play out in your school and classroom.