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Zeke Michel
EDU 1010
Ryan Miller
08/07/2015
Professional Portfolio Reflection
This class was a great first look at teaching as a career. There were a lot of topics brought
up pertaining to field work, licensure, and classroom management. I believe that this class and
its curriculum is great for the beginning of your education for becoming a teacher because it
gives you almost all of the information you need to know whether or not you want to become a
teacher one day.
This class has taught me a lot about field work, I got to look in depth at what I will be
doing as a teacher throughout the assignment of this course. I learned strategies for having
diverse learners and different cultures in the classroom. I got to learn about how to effectively
manage class time, and manage the classroom itself. However I didnt just get to look at it
throughout the book, I got to see it first-hand. Perhaps I was a little bit luckier than others
because I am employed as a para-educator in a severe special education school called Jordan
Valley, but even if I hadnt, the class requires 20 hours of volunteering in a classroom. It didnt
stop there either, we were asked to create a lesson plan and implement it. We were able to get
almost a complete teacher experience minus the years of doing it every day. Yet it still showed us
what you must do as a teacher and how you have to manage the classroom. It gives you the tools
to decide whether or not this is actually what you want to do with your life.

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Another hot topic we learned about is licensure, and the two different ways to obtain it.
The two ways to obtain licensure are Traditional and Alternative. Alternative is for people who
already have a Bachelors degree in a content area. For this type of licensure a teacher would
have to complete an intensive teacher-training experience and participate in a supervised
teaching internship. This is a shorter route for someone who wasnt originally on the teaching
path. The Traditional route is typically housed in colleges and universities and lead into your
Bachelors degree. They require general education classes on top of teaching program classes.
Depending on what population you want to teach you may have to become an expert in one area
and pass a content-area exam. This is the longer route but possibly trains you for the classroom
better.
I went into my field study with the assumption that anyone could be a teacher if they
wanted to. I still believe that but I now know that it is a lot harder than just saying Im going to
be a teacher because its easy to teach kids. Its not easy to teach kids, I was aware of the
challenges but I never knew how many there were. You have to be able to manage time, keep
track of 12 students who are severely disabled, manage their IEPs all in a 7 hour day, plus
another one hour to make new IEPs and determine all of their new goals. Being a teacher is not
easy, you have to have the drive, the compassion, and lets face it the organization skills to
become an effective teacher. Without this teaching shouldnt even cross your mind as a career
path.
A great thing that came from this class was the opportunity to start a professional
portfolio. By starting this now I have the knowledge of how to write a lesson plan, and how to
write a reflection of how it turned out and what to change in the future. I also now have the
knowledge of what I want my philosophies are as a teacher in case I ever get off track. I have

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learned all the different ways of how to be an effective teacher and how to implement them, all
from this one class. Now I will be able to build upon that knowledge so that I can rise from a
new teaching student, to becoming an expert teacher.