Professional Conference Experience

      I was fortunate enough to be selected to present a seminar session to educators at the 2014 Montana Education Association Teacher's Conference. The session I taught was worth three recertification credits for attendee's. I taught an interdisciplinary lesson on the art of cartography. I gave the educators a brief history on the art of cartography, and discussed how the lesson could link to the core content areas within schools including math, language arts, social studies and science. In my session each teacher was provided with a printed lesson plan, a sign up sheet to be emailed the power point presentation, and a grading rubric in addition to the example that the teachers made in the seminar. The hands-on art portion of the project had the educators making their own map with a list of requirements such as a compass, decorated border, islands, and a series of other requirements.  After the map is finished, it is antiqued in tea.
      I gave each educator a short form to fill out providing me feedback on what they thought of the lesson, and if they had any suggestions to me as a teaching candidate on my presentation. I received some great feedback...we all benefitted from the experience.

           The map is designed around a students imaginary private island for an art lesson, however, in an interdisciplinary setting the core teacher could adapt the requirements for any content they wished to cover as maps are so universal. The strong focus on co-teaching in the education world is a nice idea, but not practical in schools as that would require more staffing. However, working together on interdisciplinary lessons for use in individual classrooms--covering more than one classes content--is an attainable and successful method of teaching communally within a school and helping to "drive home" lesson objectives in different formats for students to have broader academic coverage of the information.

Here is an example of a student made map using my lesson plan.

During my student teaching I attended many in-service meetings and days of learning for faculty, however, (unfortunately for me) due to the new schools being built in the district these meetings were used as ways for the schools' administrations to work on the organization of the new schools staffing, curriculum, scheduling, etc., it was however very fascinating to absorb how such a huge undertaking is accomplished! So, still a wonderful experience.