James Jensen
Educator / Learner
Annotated Transcript
Below you will find courses that I took while in the Michigan State University Master of Arts in Education (MAED) program at Michigan State University. The courses are listed in chronological order by semester.
The following acronyms are used for class codes:
ED - Education
EAD - Educational Administration
TE - Teacher Education
Fall 2016
TE 801 - Professional Roles & Teaching Practice I
Professor: Judith Lanache-Whitcomb
The course, which was the first of my graduate program, occurred during my year long internship with Chicago Public Schools. The course was intended to push our theoretical understanding of teaching and integrate it with authentic classroom experiences. The course focused on teaching specific subject matter to a class of students with an emphasis on the individual student and their specific needs. In this course, I was instructed on ways of organizing a classroom space and community through implementing engagement, assessment, and differentiation strategies. This course focused on mathematical practices as a focal subject, was an introduction to teaching in a professional context and provided me with an introduction to the development of my own teaching philosophy.
TE 802 - Reflection & Inquiry in Teaching Practice I
Professor: Dr. Cassie J. Brownell
This course took place during the fall semester of my student-teaching internship and focused on curriculum design and revision. This course consisted of the lesson and unit design process as well as best practices for reflection and inquiry. This course also maintained a strong focus on the Common Core Standards and both district and state level curricular mandates. Through this course, I learned how to self-reflect as a program facilitator and as an adult learner. By analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the programs I designed through this course, I was able to collect and apply data to future curricular development. The skills developed in this course have allowed me to design, revise, and facilitate high quality lesson plans in my professional practice. This course focused primarily on literacy instruction and was rooted in language learning and language usage.
TE 501 - Intern Teaching Diverse Learners I
Field Instructor: Dr. Margo Criscuola
This course was a field-based learning experience that was completing during my year long internship with Chicago Public Schools. For my field placement, I was placed at Bret Harte Elementary in the Hyde Park neighborhood of South Chicago. I was assigned a field instructor for this course, Dr. Margo Criscuola. Dr. Criscuola frequently visited my field placement and aided in lesson plan creation, classroom management critiques, and reflective feedback sessions with myself and my mentor teacher, Nikki Turley. This course was designed to prepare me and my fellow intern cohort to engage in effective practice and reflection as professional teachers.
Spring 2017
TE 803 - Professional Roles & Teaching Practice II
Professor: Dr. Cassie J. Brownell
This course took place during my final semester of my student teaching year. Throughout this course, I was focused on developing strong interpersonal relationships with administrators and other educators while also building strong communication skills that allowed me to learn about the student community I was servicing. Focusing on strategies that would improve students home and school connectives and creating a cohesive classroom environment, this course, allowed me to build strong relationships with my class and other educators in my building. While focusing on these engagement strategies, I was able to successfully integrate these skills and strategies to an integrated social studies curriculum that spanned a ten week unit cycle. This class also gave me the opportunity to dive into the professional and ethical responsibilities of a teacher, as well as learning to accommodate diverse learners inside the classroom. I left this course feeling as though I was prepared for the challenges that lie ahead in my teaching career.
TE 804 - Reflection & Inquiry in Teaching Practice II
Professor: Judith Lanache-Whitcomb
This course engaged students in differing levels of inquiry and reflection by challenging implicit ideas and biases I had with regards to the education system. I was tasked with modeling effective planning and problem solving by creating a dynamic science unit based on the Next Generation Science Standards to use in our student teaching classroom. With this unit, I focused on data collection and assessment strategies that allowed for cross-discipline integration of assessments and data tools. By creating pre and post assessments that could inform my instruction, I learned to revise curricular material and tailor instruction to our learners. With an emphasis on the active learning community, I was able to successfully implement this unit seeing both enthusiasm and engagement in my students.
TE 502 - Intern Teaching Diverse Learners II
Field Instructor: Dr. Margo Criscuola
This course was the bookend of my student teaching experience with Chicago Public Schools. During this course, I spent time working in my field placements with my field instructor, Dr. Criscuola. During this fieldwork, there was significant time spent on reflecting where I had been at the beginning of the school year, with regards to my classroom management and professional practice, and how far I had come. Much of this course was dedicated to preparing for the next step of my career, which was the initial job hunt. This course allowed me to spend significant time understanding the education job search world, developing effective teacher-driven resumes and cover letters, and spending time learning interview rhetoric and techniques for success. This course had a significant impact where I am today, as it was a large reason I ended up with my first teaching job. This course also allowed for me to reflect and synthesize my experiences during my internship year.
Spring 2019
EAD 830: Issues in Urban Education: Racial Achievement Gap
Professor: Dr. Jada Moultrie-Phelps
This course provided me with a first glimpse into the world of educational administration. While this course focused primarily on equitable education and the opportunity gap (known as equity debt in education), this course also looked at how we, as a society, got here in the education sector. By also giving course participants a deep dive into the historical and sociological contexts of racial achievement and inequity in education, I learned valuable lessons in critical self-reflection. This self-reflection was not only at a systemic level, but also as an interpersonal level where I challenged my own biases about schooling. Leaving this course, I was left with a better understanding the significance of my own decisions with regards to equitable education and ready to make purposeful shifts in practice to better support students of color.
Concepts of Educational Inquiry allowed my classmates and I do take a deeper look at the concept of inquiry itself and how it plays a significant role in the educational sector. Inquiry has allowed education to evolve to what it is today at both the micro and macro level. Inquiry is the process of investigating and solving our problems. This course, which I completed in the Spring of 2019, allowed me to study a vast array of concepts related to the process of inquiry and earn how it is practiced, used to analyze data, and viewed within the education sector. This course allowed me to build a foundation for which I can base my understandings of inquiry off of and take back to my professional practice immediately. The course assignments allowed my classmates and I to be critical with our analysis of historical and contemporary primary source documents related to educational inquiry. I have used the skills and strategies I learned from this coursework to become more efficient with how I use data in my classroom and in my school.
Summer 2019
TE 846: Accommodating Differences in Literacy Learners
Professor: Christina Ponzio
846 Accommodating differences in literacy learners is the critical focus of TE 846. When constructing literacy plans for students with diverse learning styles and preferences, it is important to refer to best practices for literacy and pay close attention to how we tailor our instruction to meet the needs of all students. This course focused on the impact that literacy preferences, skills, and deficits can have on student success in a classroom space. By collecting and analyzing real student data from focal students in the field, my classmates and I were able to analyze specific areas of growth for the students and determine how we, using best practices, could catalyze that growth depending on their learning style and preference. This course closed with a holistic literacy learner project that required me to work with this focal student one on one for six weeks. Throughout this project, I collected data, made revisions to learning plans, and implemented related tasks to student goal setting conversations. This project is deeply rooted is best practices and has had significant impact on how I teach literacy in my own classroom today.
The “learning society” is a popular phrase used to describe recent developments in education across one's lifespan and developments in how institutions can facilitate lifelong growth for learners of all ages. The idea of the learning society has many variables and factors. From elementary schools facilitating learning in traditional education settings, to Universities and higher ed institutions funding national research, to the individual who yearns to learn the guitar and teaches them self via YouTube video. All of these places of learning embody the learning society and the humanistic desire to learn about the world. In this course, I studied the primary domains and activities of the learning society in their historical, social, economic, and cultural contexts. I also studied the experiences of individuals living and working in the learning society. Through my study of these sites for learning and the experiences of learners from around the world, I developed my own understanding of what it means to be an adult learner and designed various learning activities and lesson plans that engage the adult learner in their preferred setting of learning.
Fall 2019
EAD 863: Training & Professional Development
Professor: Dr. John Dirkx
The purpose of this course was to develop knowledge and skills around the design, development, and delivery of training and professional development (TPD) programs for adult learners. Regardless of our profession, we all engage in some form of training or professional development in our professional lives. While the delivery of these programs may seem simplistic, their design is critical to their overall effectiveness. In this course, I made the distinction between both training and professional development and work through the historical and societal implications of both styles of programming. I also examined and unpacked the multiple perspectives, concepts, theories, and understandings that have allowed TPD to become what it is today in the 21st century workplace. This course also allowed for participants to dive into complex case studies of real training and professional development programs, calling attention to their ineffectiveness and possible redesign. Lastly, this course allowed my classmates and I to design training programs that could be tailored to our own working environments and take them back to our workplaces.
Spring 2020
Professor: Dr. John Dirkx
Adult learning is a form of education that all of us take some part in, regardless of our profession or circumstance. Adult learning can take many forms whether it is formal schooling to learn a trade or skill, or informal learning to pick up a hobby. Whatever the circumstance may be, adult learning occurs all around us and it rapidly evolving with advances in modern technology. In this course, the focus was on the formal (e.g., in classroom-like settings or training programs), informal (e.g., helping patients learn about diabetes self-management or facilitating learning in the workplace), and non-formal (organized by learning organizations but non-credited) types of learning. Through this course, I developed a better understanding of what it means to be an adult learner across these contest. Through reading, case studies, data analysis of program participants, and historical primary sources, I took a deep dive into the contextual idea of adult learning. I left this course understanding what it means to be an adult learner in today's ever changing world and understanding the clear relationship between learning and development in adulthood.
This was the final course during my Master of Arts in Education program at Michigan State University. This course was organized in a way that promoted student showcase and goal setting. Throughout this course, I was tasked with reflecting on my progress throughout the program as both a learner and educator in the field. I was tasked with creating an online portfolio with which I displayed graduate course work, reflected on past and future goals, synthesized my progress and educational journey, and shared more about my practice via online platform. This course was designed with timing in mind as I spent weeks working on specific, critical aspects of mu portfolio. This time frame allowed me to reflect, draft, and revise specific focal points of my educational journey. As I created my final online portfolio, I was left with a sense of pride and achievement having seen all the work that I had put in during this program. I am eager to apply what I have learned from my coursework to the field and beyond.