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RENEE
LYNETTE WILLEMSEN-GOODE
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Connecting Theory and Practice: Connections between Student Teaching and Coursework at Swarthmore College While I was student teaching, I found myself constantly drawing from the base of material I had learned in my coursework at Swarthmore College. While I was not always thinking about specific theories or articles, I was using the information that I had learned to inform the areas of my teaching that I examined critically. Most importantly, the theories and topics I was exposed to have helped me isolate areas in which to observe and improve my own teaching strategies. For example, because I have read and though critically about multicultural education, I have made an attempt to observe my own teaching with respect to multiculturalism.A specific area of my education that has been helpful in my teaching has been learning to think about the individual needs of students. In thinking about how to teach my individual students, I often found myself thinking Vygotsky's "zone of proximal development" in trying to challenge students where they were almost able to do something. In this respect I would not frustrate my students but I would be challenging them with material that they were just about able to do. Similarly, I tried to create lessons that would engage a wide variety of learners, using my knowledge of different learner strategies as well as knowledge of Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences theory. One of the most important connections between my coursework and teaching has been in learning to observe myself and my students. As part of my coursework at Swarthmore College, I also observed many different classrooms. In each of the classes, I was directed to closely observe a different aspect of the classroom, including teacher and learner strategies. I learned to think critically about what I observed in the classroom in the teacher and students behaviors, and the interactions between different students and the teacher. These observations me pinpoint areas to observe in my own teaching and also gave me skills to use in evaluating students work during lessons. Furthermore, these observations helped me to learn not only to look at the class as a whole, but to examine individual differences between learners. While I could not actually watch myself teach outside of a videotaped lesson, I used these observation skills to reflect on my strategies as a teacher after each lesson. Similarly, I feel that these observations helped to prepare me to observe my own students at work. Not only was I observing students to evaluate them as learners, but in order to critique my own teaching.
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