Knowledge Base

Caroline Marchand
EDF 301-02
December 9th, 2016
Professor Terry Stockton
Events:
Teacher Assisting: As far as creating classroom community, I was lucky enough to work with A
CT who did such an excellent job of that. From day 1, she always created opportunities for
students to not only work with one another to become comfortable around each other, but also
with her and I as their teachers. Each day, both me and my CT would make a point to
communicate with each student individually at different points in the day. Because the classroom
that I was in had such a great sense of community, everyone felt comfortable sharing their
thoughts and ideas, and students were not afraid to ask questions and participate in classroom
discussions.
People:
My Parents: My parents were always very encouraging regardless of the situation. As a three
sport student athlete in high school, they were constantly supporting me and encouraging me to
do my best, both in and out of school. They showed me what it meant to be a hard worker and to
persevere, even when coming across a challenge or making a mistake, and that is something that
I hope to implement into my future classroom. I want my students to feel okay about making
mistakes, and to understand that making mistakes is all part of the learning process. Especially in
todays society with the amount of pressure put on students to maintain a certain GPA and
essentially become defined by test scores, I would like my students to feel that school is more
than just having good test scores.

Mr. Rohde: My varsity soccer coach for 4 years, 9th grade biology teacher, and 11th grade
Advanced Biology teacher played a large role in me wanting to be a teacher, but also showing
me different ways to be the best teacher. When I think about classroom community, I think about
how I felt in Mr. Rohdes class, he is so kind, funny, and encouraging to his students in a way
that allows him to connect with students individually. He is still teaching at the high school I
graduated from and I know that he continues to form the relationships similar to the one that him
and I had, and we still stay in contact to this day. Ironically enough, he was one of the people I
used to write a letter of recommendation for me for the College of Education at Grand Valley. It
is so important to form good relationships in the classroom, it really can go a long way!
Theories
Lev Vygotsky: Social interactions, "learning is a necessary and universal aspect of the process of
developing culturally organized, specifically human psychological function" sociocultural
approach to cognitive development
Constructivism- Constructivism as a paradigm or worldview posits that learning is an active,
constructive process. The learner is an information constructor. People actively construct or
create their own subjective representations of objective reality. New information is linked to
prior knowledge, thus mental representations are subjective.