Kathryn Laurentius

I enjoyed how this course covered four different strategies for instruction. I think the key is a combination of them to use in your classroom and varying your instruction thought out a unit of study. 

Being positive is important for students, and I also think in the classroom it can be contagious. I can tell how if I am in a grumpy or negative mood how quickly it rubs off on those around me and the opposite is true for when I am overly positive and grateful. This can sometimes be a challenging task but it is important for ourselves and our students. 

I had never heard of the VIA Institute before and plan to explore that more to potentially use it with my students in future activities. I know how important know your stengths and weaknesses can be in all areas of life. 

The importance of reflection was really impactful for me. I do a lot of reflection-based assessments in my classes with students but I rarely take the time, myself, to reflect in a meaningful way. I know adding more reflection time will help me be a better educator. 

I enjoy learning about the different ways to use and apply PERMA. It is also helpful and refreshing to hear about the emphasis on prioritizing your well-being. As educators, I feel like that is often frowned upon or put on the back burner. I look forward to learning more about positive psychology. 

I learned more about the importance of advisory councils. I know they are very helpful but it is something I struggled with early in my career. Another thing I learned was the different ways for multiple CTE programs to collaborate. I also really liked the idea of having the SBE students present to the school board as I see many different benefits in that idea. 

The biggest takeaway for me is the idea of adding industry certifications to my SBE. I want to further research this and see how I could add that as an additional benefit for my students. I see a lot of benefits to this and could see where my admin would really like that added benefit aswell. 

The information I learned in this module was helpful. The ethical dilemma idea of stagging a student 'stealing' from the store and seeing how your students report it and deal with the conflict is very interesting. I often feel in the high school setting that unethical actions are so normalized that it is an interesting way to 'test' the students. I also loved hearing the emphasis of how important soft skills are. 

I currently help run a school-based enterprise at my high school. I have never started one, but have taken over an already-established business. The process of starting one from the ground up feels intimidating and stressful. I think getting the buy-in and cooperation from the administration and student body could be very challenging. 

The prompts for peer feedback is super helpful because a lot of times it is a simple mis communication or bias that is brought into the conversation.