MAED Transcript
Please take a chronological look at the courses I took during my master's program. I hope that this will provide you with a more in depth look at what I learned and the people who helped push me to new heights in this program.
For official descriptions from Michigan State of any of these courses, you can follow this link.
Spring 2019
ED 800: Concepts in Educational Inquiry
Steven Weiland
ED 800 primary served as a way to introduce me to the MAED program at MSU and the kind of work I was going to be expected to do. I started to be introduced to some of the key ideas that go along with educational inquiry and I was given the chance to practice some of the inquiry skills that I would be using regularly over the course of my program.
Fall 2019
TE 845: Language Diversity and Literacy Instruction
Patricia Edwards
Professor Edwards and the course on Language Diversity and Literacy Instruction was my first true masters level literacy course, and I learned a lot. I've had a fair amount of experience working with a diverse group of literacy learners, but this course showed me some new and innovative ways to address a diverse set of literacy challenges as well as introduced me to some new and exciting research that was being done in the field of literacy edcuation.
Summer 2020
TE 838: Children's Literature in Film
Laura Apol
Professor Apol's course about Children's literature in film was one of the most interesting and fun classes that I have ever taken. By diving into and analyzing a number of different children's books and their film counter parts, I gained a lot of experience in teaching how to help students make connections, to critically think about the idea of artistic freedom when it comes to adaptations, and how often times a story that was one thing in the original book can be completely different in the movie version. I gained skills using multiple forms of media and texts and also gained experience on how to translate these multiple versions of a story into a great lesson.
Fall 2020
EAD 822: Diverse Students and Families
Kristy Stein
I had not taken any courses that looked at education from primarily an administrative perspective before, but EAD both put me in the shoes of an administrator and showed me ways to translate some of that administrative work to the classroom. One of the primary things that I learned from this course was about the ways that schools need to create a more inclusive community for their families, specifically families from diverse lower income communities. I learned about schools that are thriving while doing this work, I learned about schools that are trying ideas that aren't working, and I learned about how often the focus that schools are given by the state or the federal government result in aspects of school like this being pushed aside in favor of test scores.
Fall 2020
TE 818: Curriculum and It's Social Context
Nancy Romig
Professor Romig's curriculum and it's social context course was the first course I've taken that was almost entirely built around a series of blogs that my peers and I created. This class had me think about curriculum and what it meant to me personally as well as my teaching, and I gained further insight into the way I like to teach and develop curriculum as well as read about ways that my peers do the same. The regularly sharing of ideas with my peers through the blogs was a great experience and helped me learn ideas from fellow educators about curriculum that I probably would not have gotten otherwise.
Fall 2020
TE 846: Accommodating Different Literacy Learners
Jennifer Vanderheide
This course was another deep dive into literacy education and provided me with the opportunity to learn more research in the field of language learner accommodations. A lot of this course was built around a case study of a student that I chose who was a struggling literacy learner, and the actions I took to try to address those struggles through some of the methods learned in this class. The case study really helped me bring the ideas I was learning in class into the classroom in a meaningful way.
Spring 2021
TE 836: Awards and Classics in Children's Literature
Hannah Grisham
Similar to the course I took on Children's Literature in Film, Professor Grisham's course on awards and classics gave me further insight into this portion of education that I previously did not have much experience. I spent a large portion of this course analyzing different classic children's books as well as analyzing the awards that many of those books have won in the past century or so. After learning about the politics and process of how these awards are won and who they were given to, I was then given the opportunity to address the role that these classic works should play in education as a whole as well as my classroom. This was overall an incredibly interesting and rewarding class.
Spring 2021
TE 843: Secondary Reading Assessment and Instruction
Doug Hartman
Professor Hartman's class ended up being quite different than I originally expected and ended up pushing me to hone certain skills that I previously thought didn't really need more honing. Specifically, we focused a lot on our development of better slides for our students who struggle with reading. While doing this work I started to notice that while I was doing a good job of including a lot of images to go with the content I was teaching, there were definitely times where I had just too much content on my slides, and this course helped me both simplify some of my materials as well as make the main ideas of my materials stronger.
Summer 2021
TE 865: Teaching and Learning K12 Social Studies
Amy Mungur
Professor Mungur's Teaching and Learning K12 Social Studies course was one that I took to culminate my program and see how all of the literacy skills and lessons that I learned would translate to the courses that I am teaching. This course challenged me to look at different aspects of K12 education, including what it is that we want students to get out of different courses, what skills we are trying to teach them, and how we are going about making sure that students learn about these skills. This course got me to look at essential questions, connections to different standards, and the roles that accommodations can play when putting lessons and units together.
Summer 2021
ED 870: Capstone Seminar
Dr. Matthew Koehler and Aric Gaunt
The capstone course for my master's program is what helped me create the website that you are reading. I have made one or two websites previously, but one was from undergrad and the other was a blog, so this was a new experience for me. I learned a lot of great things from my peers as we gave each other feedback on our sites and I also was reminded of the work that I've done over the course of the full program. The capstone has been a great experience and has given me a skill to effectively and uniquely express what I'm capable of that I hope to continue to develop as my career progresses.