D/B11: Chapter 27

Reflect on what you perceive to be your own areas of strength and what competencies you feel you need to work hardest to develop given your professional goals.  State and describe at least three competencies you’d like to develop and why.


Based on the competencies listed on page 275, table 27.3 for the instructor, I believe that a few of my strengths would be my ability to:

• Demonstrate effective presentation skills.  I try to be conscious about my volume and pace, as well as my proximity to students who need help with focus.

• Demonstrate effective facilitation skills.  Aside from presenting/demonstrating information to students, a lot of my time "teaching" is spent facilitating their individual work on drawing assignments and projects.  It takes hard work do keep track of each student's progress, and you must constantly be switching gears from one student to the next, but I think I manage this aspect well.

• Demonstrate effective questioning skills.  This can be applied both during presentations and facilitations.  During presentation, effective questioning techniques will help to keep the students engaged.  During facilitation, I often have students ask questions that were covered during the presentation, or are covered in the text.  Rather than "spoon feed" the information to them, I ask them to review their notes and/or text.  If they are asking an application-type question that does not have an obvious answer, I try to guide them with questions to the answer.

• Evaluate instructional effectiveness.  One thing that my principal has always pointed out to me during the follow-up portion of my teacher evaluations is that I am a very reflective practitioner.  I rarely just do something and move on.  I tend to analyze how students appeared to receive the instruction, and how I might use that information to improve the next class.

A few competencies that I would like to develop include:

• Plan instructional methods and materials.  It always seems that there is not enough plan time.  I find that with the additional obligations of the teaching profession, I often resort to the way it has always been done, because it is effective (enough) and is easier than trying to implement a new method.

• Stimulate and sustain learner motivation and engagement.  I find it very discouraging during a class period, to observe the students' activity and find that they appear to be bored or uninterested in the task or assignment.  In order to address this issue, I need to work harder to identify a variety of ways to engage students based on their individual learning preferences.

• Promote retention of knowledge and skills.  This is one thing that I put some effort into this past school year, but could use additional attention.  In my first few years of teaching, I assumed too much of my students as we moved from one unit to the next.  Over time, I have learned that review and summary activities are so important for knowledge retention.  Understanding this, I am not working to improve and be consistent with these methods.

• Use media and technology to enhance learning and performance.  Thanks in large part to this class, I have come to realize that there is a lot more that I can be doing with technology in my classes.  Up until now, I was feeling pretty good about how much technology is used with my CAD students, but that has been the extent of it - CAD.  There are so many resources that are available electronically for education, which would take my classes to another level, incorporating reading, writing, communication, and additional technical skills.