As stated in my self-reflection, I was not convinced how much I would truly learn from this course besides the obvious of what this course is established to provide (which is a better understanding of the foundations of curriculum planning); however, I believe through peer-dialogue and communication, I (along with others) have experienced far more than a basic class on curriculum design because of expanded contact and peer-to-peer direct communication. My peer-dialogue was initially small group based where the communication was focused on reflection in regards to effective classrooms and practices. My second peer-dialogue consisted on weekly (mostly) conversations and exchange of information between a fellow social studies teacher and myself. In all honestly, through these two dialogue settings, I have gained more than I could have asked for at the beginning of the semester, what most people would call “invaluable” information and feedback.
Starting with my peer group; I would say the greatest piece of information I gained from this process was a sense of “normal.” What I mean by this is that we are all teachers and are all experiencing some of the same things and it makes it seem like what may seem as an “outlier” in the classroom, is simply “normal.” We mainly used journaling to reflect on our practices and through this, I think we found that as teachers, there is always things we can improve on and things we find frustrating, no matter the years spent in the classroom (i.e. not enough time, changing plans from one class to the next, trusting and being “burned” by students, etc.). I believe the best part of this was the sense of “community” we all see ourselves as a part of and it was something that allowed most (if not all) of us to be very comfortable, honest and open with opinions, thoughts and suggestions.
I also believe that my dialogue partner had a great deal of influence on how I responded to this semester and how I started to process information in the classroom differently. My partner was a fellow social studies teacher from a similar environment (smaller school, community) and happened to be coaches at our schools; which made conversing easier, which I do believe allowed for some very good (if not great) conversations. Without prior knowledge of each other; we both had already decided that a major focus of our classrooms and our curriculum should be focused on the idea of 21st century skills that our students should have; whether that was through technology or other skill building, we believe it should be a necessity in our curriculums. When we discussed stakeholders we both presented each other with a list that was similar but we also presented each other with some that we did not think of but were of great importance to our curriculum and schools.