Final Reflections

Assignment 4 - PDQP Final Reflections

Damon Garner
National University

In fulfillment of the requirements for

TED 690 Capstone Course
Dr. Pengilly

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Final Reflections

Abstract
This final paper looks at my final reflection about the course and the experiences I have

been through in the class. I examine the struggles and benefits of the course. The paper addresses

issues that would help future students in the course. I reexamine the issues I faced in choosing

certain pieces of artifacts and my future goals as an educator and lifelong learner.

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This month has flown by! I remember feeling extraordinarily anxious my first few days

trying to wrap my head around exactly what in the world was expected of me and by the long list

of assignments and necessary pieces of evidence that were required. By about the third day I

settled in and just put my head down and started writing. I slowly began to figure out what was

expected of me and the formatting for the PDQP. There were many challenges along the way and

as we are coming to a close with the class, many successes.

Looking back over the course of my teaching career and in this course in particular, I

have discovered new focuses in my teaching pedagogy and professionalism. In working in three

distinct areas of education (At risk youth, independent learning and mainstream at level high

school) I have gathered much in the way of working with a very diverse and modern style of

teaching and learning. Working with those students over the course of fifteen years and gaining

that experience is one of my strengths. There are things that I can learn and grown on though.

One of the skills I have specifically picked up from this course is to better reflect upon my own

successes and challenges as an educator. Often times, as educators, we get bogged down in the

day to day lesson planning and presenting to our students. Ive noticed that there are really good

lessons and projects that I forgot about until I opened up the vault of old samples that I had. I

definitely think part of the reason for this is the focus changed over the course of my teaching

career from project based learning to standards based learning. This however, should not deter

one from using best practices and samples.

In creating the PDQP I discovered a new sense of focus and organization that I definitely

will improve on in my own classroom this upcoming school year. Portfolios are one of the most

authentic ways to represent the knowledge, dispositions, and skills of a teacher. When used with

other methods of evaluating teacher performance, portfolios can provide a broader perspective of

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a teachers full range of professional competencies (Constantino & De Lorenzo, 2009, p. 7). I

started using a Power Point presentation for my PDQP but quickly discovered that there are

many more appealing and practical websites that will host my Eportfolio for free. I settled on

Google Sites because of my familiarity with Google Classroom, docs and slides. The portfolio I

have created has given me the ability to showcase my work, store my best assignments and gives

me an idea for assigning portfolios to my students next year. One of the challenges to this course

was collecting and sifting through the stacks and stacks of artifacts to choose from. The

Eportfolio will help organize these artifacts for me and chronicle my history as a teaching

professional.

The course gave me an excellent opportunity to map out a five year plan for my future

goals as an educator. As teachers, again, we often get caught up in the day to day challenges in

our own classrooms and we dont reflect and plan nearly enough for our own growth as

professional educators. By slowing down and focusing this summer I have mapped out a plan to

improve and shore up my content knowledge and general teaching skills through professional

development. I have been going through professional development programs for many years, but

they are programs assigned from the district. To have control over what you know you need,

developmentally, will help your professional journey be much more successful.

For future students I would recommend googling TED 690 portfolios right off the bat.

There are some really great examples out there on the internet. With that being said, I would also

recommend starting the process of gathering documents and artifacts and storing them in a

Power Point presentation until the student is comfortable with using and manipulating the

plethora of websites out there. It kind of reminds me of what I tell my own students if they are

having problems with a particularly difficult question. Skip that problem and come back to it

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later. That is another piece of advice I would offer any future students. Work on the things you

know and are comfortable with. Tinkering with the websites after youve written for a while or

have been searching for artifacts, can break up the overload you run into after writing for hours

on end. For me personally this strategy paid off and I became confident and comfortable working

with the Google Sites portfolio. Another piece of advice that worked well for me was pacing out

the assignments in a few hours every day instead of doing big blocks of time on the assignment

over a few days. This gave me the opportunity to set into a routine and not burn out. One of my

challenges was getting hung up on an exact format or an exact way to do the PDQP. After

looking through many examples, there is not exact copy or exact way to do it. This gives us the

flexibility to be creative and work with what we are comfortable with.

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Reference

Constantino, P. & De Lorenzo, M. (2009). Developing a professional teaching portfolio: A

guide for success (3rd ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education.