C4T #3

Comments for Teachers

The blog I had to post on for this C4T was Connected Principles. Below I have a summary of what I learned from their posts and the comments I left for the blog.

     In For a Million Dollars, You Could at Least..., Tom Martellone discusses the winner of a million dollar global teaching award. He was excited that someone from Maine where he started his teaching career managed to receive this prestigious award and give it to her school. However, he was disappointed by her attitude towards the current public school system. He expressed the importance that upcoming educators should be excited to make a difference in the lives of children. He urges young educators to not waiver under the pressure of the changes to school curriculum and to push forward with their passion for teaching. My comment for his post expressed the concern over the stresses of the new curriculum being put in place. I asked him what some good ideas were to encourage future educators to keep pushing on through the stress and to keep in mind their passion for teaching. So far, I have not gotten a response.

     Teacher Interview Questions that Work was the second post I read on Connected Principles. This post by SBlankenship covered a series of probing questions that principles could ask potential teachers they were thinking of hiring. He expresses that its important to ask deep questions in order to understand the candidates teaching style and their motivation for teaching. I found these questions to be very helpful in preparing future educators for possible questions they may face and to be helpful in trying to discover my own teaching style and motivations. I expressed how useful I thought these questions were and the author wrote back that my comment made his day. Through this post, he was hoping to have aspiring teachers think about and reflect on each question. Here's something he said that I thought was great: "Remember, a reflective practitioner always questions their own pedagogy."