Self-Evaluation

For F500, we are evaluating our strengths and weaknesses as teachers. Surveying my strengths and weaknesses, I can see some areas for improvements, and other areas that I will continue to emphasize as strengths.

Strengths: My greatest strength as a member of the w200 team in the TTL lab is my successful experience as a teacher. As someone who has enabled students to truly excel despite significant obstacles, I feel that my principal strength as a teacher is my focus on instructional effectiveness. More specifically, how to motivate and inspire middle school students. Also, being very familiar with the economic, political, and educational environment, I can provide w200's pre-service teachers with ideas and strategies for overcoming obstacles they will encounter in their teaching, and in their efforts to use computers in the classroom.

Weaknesses: My greatest weakness is time management. I tend to focus on ensuring that my students really learn a given concept well rather than orientating them to a large number of things. This means my natural tendency is to spend a lot of time on a small number of concepts. Curricular trends in the Indiana academic standards, and in w200 seem to be heavily weighted in favor of the latter. I think the key to adapting to this different approach is to realize that, specifically for learning about technology, that latter approach is the most appropriate because technology changes rapidly, making in-depth learning of a specific software (particularly constantly changing web 2.0 apps) is not productive.