Diving into Education Psychology- (Post 1)

Q: What are you interested in learning about? What do you want to get out of this class? How do you think this class will help you in your future profession?

As you know, I have jumped right into a new profession of school librarianship this year. (And what a crazy year it has been--but we'll save that for another post. Or maybe not.) With this career change comes more learning and more school to get my teaching license and School Media Endorsement. I told my administrators when they hired me that I had the library portion of the job down, but that I'm brand new to the world of teaching and education--luckily, they they saw in me some innate ability to teach that I am just starting to see in myself and have been very supportive of me while I work towards "getting it."

I believe that in addition to the day-to-day classroom experience that has been invaluable last year, this course, Education Psychology (for which I am writing this and several future posts), will be a major puzzle piece towards "IT". I am so green, I really had no idea what the content of this course would be. I believe some part of me actually thought that it would (perhaps psycho-analyze would be a strong term, here, but...) help me figure out what is going on in my students brains in order to deflect their tactics of getting off-task, talking as soon as everyone is finally listening, and rocking in their chairs. I am joking--some. So, I am excited that this class will perhaps offer some insight to these behavioral issues, but much, much more--including classroom management, how students learn, different teaching methods, praxis practice and more information on the self-evalutation portion of my four evaluations a year! I am also very jazzed to decode some of the professional language that pervaded me at every staff meeting, PE, and pre- and post-evaluation conference this past year: for example, "transfer" and "summative" and "formative evaluation." Yep, I think this course will be very enlightening not only for the classroom and students, but the culture of schools.

Let's get started!