Christian Faltis: Things Still Needed at TAMIU

the success? Well, you know, that’s a that’s a that’s a tough question. I think what we’re what we need to do better at this point is have different ways of understanding how well our teacher educators are doing with regard to the kinds of things that they’re doing in their class. Because teacher education as a field or teacher, educator preparation is pretty sort of isolated. There are different faculty that teach social studies, science, music, arts, mathematics, reading and typically in universities and in teacher ED programs. We don’t go into those classes. We don’t know about that. We have discussions. But what we’re trying to do here at TAMIU is to develop a sense or a way of of doing self assessments of our what we’re doing in our classrooms and then sharing that back with other teacher educators. And I’m trying to do that in our EP meetings so that we we have a better understanding of what we’re all doing. And then also of understanding where where our students are having difficulty and our own teacher education classrooms. So we can we can get data from tests, but that that just shows you how well they perform on a test. And what I’d like to do is is have a better understanding of what it is that each one of us is doing in the classroom with regard to, you know, eliciting and interpreting student thinking and language in encouraging bilingualism by literacy, ensuring that the kinds of materials that we have our culturally relevant and sustaining how we talk about that in class and then to share that out among all of our faculty so that we all we all know that we’re doing that because right now we’re sort of moving toward this transformative model where those are the goals that we have. But we were just in the place where we’re doing those, but we don’t know what we’re doing in the classrooms exactly. So as we roll this out, I think we’ll have a much better understanding. I think that will benefit all of us because I can I can learn from what you know. Dr. Gill is doing in her science class around these things and share those or Dr. Perry in his mathematics class. These these two people I just mentioned are just extraordinary teacher educators and math and science. So our students are doing well. I want to know and they want to know what I’m doing in my bilingual courses and my second language acquisition courses to to foment and to promote certain kinds of ways of talking and understanding that will carry over to those content area courses as well. So as we develop that, and that’s more of a that’s a kind of a sort of informal assessment of ourselves, of our understanding ourselves and building into our teacher education education program, a sense of reflection about our teaching and sharing that reflections with others and in my experience in teacher education that hasn’t been done before. It’s very difficult because each faculty sort of owns their own classroom. And what we’re trying to do here at TAMIU within our teacher preparation program is to begin to share out those reflections so that we, each of us understand what we’re doing and the faculty here is on board with that. They want to do that. We just haven’t developed those key ways of assessment and reflection that we want, but we’re going there and everybody is is is really excited about doing that because I think that just helps us understand where we are in this arc of experience. We want to call it that. We want to make sure that we’re all having similar kinds of experiences and that we can build on those because we’re trying to. We’re trying to sort of understand where certain things happen on this arc of experience and then how well they’re happening and how we can support one another. As, let’s say what Dr. Gill is doing in science, what I can do in my class to pick up on those things and same with math or in language arts, how we can bring children’s books in or in reading, how we can bring in sort of bilingual approaches to doing these kinds of phonological awareness or phonics or those kinds of things moving towards comprehension. So that’s to me, that’s really exciting stuff, and and I look forward to doing that in the coming years. Yeah.

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