PME 811: Blog Assignment

Final Reflection  Overall, my blog posts have reflected ways to be innovative and creative in the classroom while exploring what that means. At the start of the course, I had felt that innovative teaching was almost impossible for me to accomplish. I felt that innovative classroom practices involved changing the school system, making flipped classes, and changing the physical space. However, throughout the course I have learned that innovative classrooms can be small changes to the traditional way school has been taught and also can be the same as how others are teaching. Another important piece of knowledge that I have acquired through the course has been expanding various types of innovative teaching. For the most part, myself included at the start of the course, innovative learning did not always include social justice aspects. By allowing for these issues to be explored and included in general classroom practice I thought it was general good practices rather than an innovative ...

Final Glossary and Reflection  Innovation  Definition  Innovation is taking an active approach to solving a problem or evaluating a problem in a unique way. Innovation requires reflection on what issues have been affecting their practice and taking the necessary steps to facilitate the unique change to address the problem.   Justification  Innovation is an active process to address an issue in a unique way, but it also requires prior knowledge. Weiskopf (2016), addresses innovation as using knowledge from other professionals and building on that knowledge to address new issues. In education, DeLuca et al., (2024), study revealed that educators who felt that if they were doing an assessment that was similar to their peers, then it was no longer innovative. However, using prior knowledge to solve a problem in a unique way is an innovative method to address issues. For example, AI tools in the classroom have been an issue affecting critical thinking skill devel...