March 29, 2021
Moreland University’s Teach-Now teacher candidate program is a great way to become certified via three different states: Washington D.C., Arizona, and Hawaii. I have chosen certification through D.C. because we have family there and I thought if there’s a place I might return to in America it would be DC. After a long nine months which were made even longer by the pandemic lockdowns and distance learning, I completed the course work for teacher certification. I started in June of 2020 and finished in February 2021. My student teacher or “clinical practice” was a trial by fire where I fully took over the classroom right when we went into lock down distance learning. I was so grateful that I had the months before winter break to connect and be with the class in person. My next journey will be taking the Praxis Elementary K-6 content exams. I’m currently in the Multilingual-Learner Teaching Masters (education) program coursework, which will be finished in June. After that I will take the ESL Praxis exam to get my credential for ESL on my teaching certificate. The journey of student teaching is my second experience, the first one I was in a second grade classroom on the military post with students of military or civilian parents. It was great for me to see the difference between an international school versus the American school for Department of Defense Education Activity. I know that my mind could work anywhere, but heart is with international schools.
To record my learning journey during the nine months of Teach-Now certificate program I have made a website called Teaching Schupp that will help me recall and refer to what I learned. It was a dynamic program that involved many types of resources and not just textbooks that I might have found at a traditional university. The learning also came from my cohort, who were an amazing group of people with many combined years of experience from all over the world. I miss them and hope to keep up with them via our different social connections we have made on LinkedIn, Twitter, and our WhatsApp group.
The 21st century nature of our learning through the Moreland University certification and masters programs are on point with the changes in how we teach and learn, not just as a result of the pandemic, but also in regard to keeping up with the rapid shift in cultural ideas that we respond to on what seems like a daily basis in the education world. Of course there are the time tested research and theories that still apply, but education is not standing still. Many of our activities require candidates to create blog posts and other web based things. Some of the items I created are on the Teaching Schupp website. From now I will try to consolidate my blog and other web creations onto this site, as I learn and grow. For those posts, check out the Masters in Multilingual-Learner, MTML Blog.
Curious21stLearner 