Content Knowledge Reflection

• My outside of school experiences have deepened my subject area content knowledge. My father greatly encouraged me to stay in school and work toward long time goals.  This gave me a reason to continue on with my education and developed my passion in reading and creative writing. This interest in reading has improved my understanding of creative writing.  My travels have also improved my understanding of cultures and geography. In order to pay my way through college I worked five years in an early childhood program, The Growing Room, and this has helped me understand age appropriate learning and how to help students with special needs. My interaction with people has helped my communications skills, however, it is difficult to know how these skills will help my teaching career.  

• Responding to the class discussion of Ball's "The Subject Matter Preparation of Teacher." My initial judgements have not changed.  I believe that we all agree better subject matter preparation is beneficial for student learning.  I believe that doing this will help answer the student question, "Why should I learn this?"  The combinations of the two articles that we have read about subject matter preparation has helped my understanding of each paper.  In my opinion I believe that we can use this as a filter for the two papers, both are interesting although this one, I found to be much more interesting, perhaps because it was more focused on enlightening the reader than impressing the reader.  However, the usefulness of the paper are questionable.  Where are the specific possibilities for improvement such as online interaction groups for teachers with similar problems and interest or suggestions for summer college seminars that focus on subject matter understanding and how to make it interesting for students so they want to learn it?

• I'm still developing and pursuing my line of inquiry.  My question is how to teach English learners literacy in small groups and to find the advantages and disadvantages of teaching them literacy in the small groups.  I have learned that teaching in smalls groups is not always the most effective way of teaching depending on the students' culture.  I would like to learn more of when and when not to use small groups.