Nicole Bowman

INTASC Standard #4
When creating a strong learning environment, it is important that a teacher can show a
variety of ways of understanding the content, as well as reaching a variety of learning styles in
their students. As a student at Kutztown University, I have heard this mantra time and time
again. Although it was something I understood carrying through with it was a different ideal
altogether.
When I began my field experience, something that I found that I immediately struggled
with was understanding the content. Because of my professional semester experience, I already
had a strong foundational understanding of where a first grader would be academically by the
end of their school year, but I was then placed three grades ahead into the fourth grade for my
clinical experience. With talking to my cooperating teacher, and doing a vast amount of
research, I found this challenge to be less overwhelming and I could teach the content with
confidence.
After my fourth grade experience at Muhlenberg Elementary Center, I was placed into a
third grade classroom at 12th and Marion Elementary School in Reading, Pennsylvania. I walked
into that classroom much more confident in my ability to understand the content, but still
aware of my struggles in the past. This provided proof of my ability to reflect on myself as a
teacher. The jump from fourth grade down to third was not difficult, and I already had a general
idea of what the fourth grade students had struggled with because they had not learned it in
third grade, which allowed me to understand where I would need to start when teaching the
third grade class.
The examples I included as evidence of my understanding of content are my transcript
from my undergraduate career at Kutztown University and an example of a text set I created for
my professional semester experience in first grade. The transcript shows my growth as a college
student into becoming a teacher. The places I would like to point out in particular are the
general education classes that I had to take. These classes provided me with content knowledge
for future teaching endeavors. Although I struggled with some of these classes, the education
classes directly related to my major are where I blossomed incredibly.
The text set was created for my Earth Day project that I used in the first grade
classroom. I already had a general understanding of Earth Day, but I had to do some research
on the content. I created a text set with twenty books, of all different genres, based around
Earth Day, for the students to read. I also incorporated many of these books in various lessons
throughout my experience there.