Catalog Description
Guides aspiring teachers of early childhood and elementary age learners in developing skills in designing and organizing lessons and units that involve students in appropriate learning activities, require thinking at a range of levels, and use a variety of assessment methods. Course content will include an examination of curriculum foundations, a variety of specific curricular models, instructional skills and strategies, assessment methods, and classroom management systems. Throughout this course, social studies concepts will serve as the content and provide a context around which treatments of general methods will be organized.
Course Outcomes
As a result of participating in this course, prospective teachers will be able to:
• demonstrate a functional understanding of the fundamental elements of curriculum for early childhood through elementary.
• formulate educational goals and objectives that are appropriate and require working at higher cognitive levels.
• experience a variety of instructional strategies, including cooperative learning, and identify appropriate application for early childhood and elementary classroom.
• become familiar with a number of student-centered learning strategies including the project approach and emergent curriculum approach
• prepare lessons and units that use a variety of instructional strategies and skills, incorporate learning theory, Bloom's Taxonomy, learning styles, and multiple intelligences, and are appropriate to developmental levels, goals and objectives.
• design lessons with activities and learning centers that allow children to move at their own pace in acquiring important skills in all developmental areas-physical, social, emotional, and intellectual.
• use effective instructional practices.
• understand a variety of foundational early childhood and elementary curricular models and appropriately incorporate aspects of these models into curriculum design.
• explore classroom management systems.
• use a variety of methods for assessing student learning and performance.
• explore a variety of new ideas in education and analyze their effectiveness in the early childhood and elementary setting.
• consider child developmental theory and the principles of educational psychology when making curricular decisions
• identify appropriate social education and social studies goals and use as a guide to select content that teaches social understanding and civic efficacy.
• evaluate one's own classroom instruction through micro-teaching and peer coaching experiences.
• recognize fundamental social studies concepts and benchmarks, and demonstrate the ability to integrate them into lessons and thematic units
• design a modified work sample for early childhood and elementary learners that incorporates an understanding of best practices for teaching these age groups, includes a variety of appropriate learning experiences and instructional models, and utilizes authentic performance tasks and scoring guides.
Topical Outline
1. Community Building
Students experience a variety of team building and class building strategies, understand the rationale for use, and analyze for application in the classroom.
2. Defining Curriculum
Students review the history of early childhood and elementary curriculum with a focus on critical deconstruction.
Students will explore various definitions of curriculum from the early childhood and the elementary perspectives, will discuss issues related to curriculum development and implementation and will increase their understanding of the components that characterize high quality curricula at both authorization levels.
3. Learning Styles
Students identify their own learning style, become knowledgeable of characteristics of different learning styles, regarding positive attributes and learning strengths, curriculum emphasis, preferred classroom environment, preferred approaches to learning, learning liabilities, and creating motivation.
4. Cognitive Levels
Students work with Bloom’s Taxonomy. They consider higher cognitive levels in all areas of instruction and assessment.
5. Rationale and Goals
Students articulate rationales and goals for units of instruction. To be considered are State Content Standards and Benchmarks, the needs and development of the learner, and integration with other subject areas. Special attention will be paid to the social studies standards and benchmarks.
6. Instructional Objectives
Students differentiate types and purposes of instructional objectives and write objectives appropriate to the purpose of the activity, expressive or behavioral.
Students design behavioral objectives that identify the cognitive level of thinking, the learning in the lesson, and the behaviors by which the learning will be assessed.
7. Curricular Models
Students review and become familiar with a variety of curricular models such as Montessori, High Scope, Bank Street, Waldorf, Reggio Emilia, and discuss means for incorporating aspects of these models into curriculum design. When possible, students will visit classrooms that utilize these models. Differential treatments of the social studies curriculum will be contrasted between the models.
8. Elements of Effective Instruction
Students understand and apply instructional skills that include selecting objectives at the correct level of difficulty, utilizing a task analysis, monitoring student learning, drawing on students’ prior knowledge, modeling procedures and expectations, and summarizing key learnings of lesson.
9. Instructional Strategies
Students use a variety of instructional strategies/models of teaching appropriate to early childhood and elementary characteristics. Strategies focus on guiding children’s involvement, extending their ideas, responding to their questions, engaging them in conversation, and challenging their thinking.
10. Cooperative Learning
Students understand and apply the basic principals of cooperative learning. Students design lessons using cooperative learning strategies and considering the domains of usefulness.
11. Lesson Design
Students consider learning objectives, content, and developmental levels of learners to determine design of lessons (e.g. direct instruction, indirect instruction, student centered, emergent).
Students design lessons that integrate traditional subject areas so learning occurs primarily through emergent projects, learning centers, and playful activities that reflect children’s interests and suggestions. A specific focus of these lessons will be aspects of the social studies curriculum.
10. Content Standards and Benchmarks
Students design lessons and units that support appropriate content standards and benchmarks.
11. Assessment
Students will understand a variety of assessment practices and determine appropriate use.
Students will understand the importance of basing curriculum planning for early childhood and elementary programs on teachers’ observations and recordings of each child’s special interests and developmental progress.
Students will design a performance based task as part of a work sample.
12. Multiple Intelligences
Students will consider the multiple intelligences as they plan for instruction. (Howard Gardner MI theory)
13. Integrated Approach
Students will understand the varying models and degrees of integrating curriculum.
Students will understand the value of integrating traditional subject areas in early childhood and elementary programs.
14. Characteristics of the Learner
Students will review developmental characteristics of early childhood learners and elementary learners. Students will apply developmentally appropriate practices as they design instruction.
15. Play and Learning
Students will explore the role of play in early childhood curriculum and discuss appropriate ways to utilize play and exploration of materials as a classroom learning activity at a range of grade levels.
16. Technology and Teaching
Students will be involved in examining applications of computers and other technologies to the early childhood and elementary curriculum. Hands-on explorations of technology in context will facilitate a concrete understanding of its utility.
17. Student Centered Learning
Students will understand the value of a learning environment where learners construct their own knowledge. Many different models of learning centers and their use will be presented and discussed with a specific focus on social studies applications.
18. Classroom Management
Students will explore a variety of classroom management systems.
19. Micro teaching
Students will practice using instructional skills and strategies. Students are encouraged to practice designing curricula based on the use of learning centers and projects.
20. Families and Community
Students will examine methods for incorporating families and members of the community as a part of the classroom learning environment.
21. Modified Work Sample
Students will synthesize all aspects of the program in a modified work sample.
Course Assessment
Students will be assessed on their written analysis of and reaction to education journal articles.
Students will be assessed on completion of two micro teaching lessons, to include construction of lesson plans, teaching lessons, and critical analysis of lessons taught.
Students will be assessed on their understanding of foundational early childhood and elementary curricular models and the synthesis of these models in the construction of student-centered learning environments and lessons.
Students will be assessed on their ability to synthesize all aspects of the program and apply it in completion of a modified work sample, to include all TSPC requirements plus an authentic performance-based task and scoring guides.