Course Contract Review

1. What are you doing well?

I have been keeping up on the homework all semester and turning it in on time. I have come to class everyday and participated in the class activities. During field experience I really tried to watch for things that applied to psychology class and to notice how the kids responded to those techniques. I have been trying to apply the information I have learned in class to everyday life.

2. What are you not doing well?

One thing that I am still not doing well in the class is reading the full chapters in the textbook. I read for the information we need to know for class and that is it. I know that the rest of the information is very helpful and beneficial but it had been hard to do anything this semester that wasn't required, since it was so busy. I would like to go back through the book and read some parts I skipped over during the semester.

3. Are you making sufficient progress on your goals?

One of my goals this semester was to learn more about the brain and how I can use that information to better teach my future students. As I was studying for the final I was actually surprised at how much of the information I remembered. Usually when I study for finals I hardly remember the stuff from the beginning of the semester at all, but this time I really seemed to remember and understand it just from seeing the word and not the definition. I think that I'm really starting to learn how knowing about the brain can change the way I think about teaching.


4. List specific things you need to change in order to meet your goals.

One of my goals was to get help with anything that is not clear. There are still a few things that we learned in class that I felt like I didn't totally understand and I plan to research those things more in the future in order to better understand how they apply in the classroom.


5. How is your motivation? Are you focusing on mastery or performance goals? Does anything need to change?

I really started to focus more on mastery goals after field experience. I think it really helped me realize that the stuff we are learning in class really does apply in the classroom. The things that the cooperating teacher used that we learned about in this class really seemed to work well with the students and they really seemed to understand the information better when the teacher used things like scaffolding. I feel like I'm motivated more now to learn for my own benefit rather than to just get a good grade.