College+of+New+Jersey

Throughout this school year I have been working towards attaining my high school teacher's certification from The College of New Jersey (TCNJ). I have completed two full courses, including my internship, and am currently working on a third course as of March 2009. I will be spending two more weeks for the summer session of TCNJ in Bangkok this coming June/July after which I will graduate from the program.

This has been a highly rewarding year for me as a teacher and a student. I feel my passion for teaching has grown very much over this year as I have been reflecting on my in-class teaching, planning and assessment for some of my college papers and assignments. The internship course I took over the good part of this school year was very challenging as I put together unit plans, lesson plans, wrote critical papers on selected readings and worked with an online community of other students in the course. I always did my best to observe and meet required deadlines.

During the online "Teaching Reading Comprehension" course I worked with groups over the internet to put together unique lesson plans and furthered my understanding of critical reading skills. One valuable skill that I learned from this reading course was the idea of "mental modeling" in which the teacher not only models good practice but also models the thought process aloud. I was very fascinated by this cognitive transparency and went out of my way to implement it in my class. As of now I am enrolled in a Secondary Content methods class. I have only completed three weeks of the course and it has been very rewarding as we are learning to take universal concepts that most people study in university and learn ways to adapt the ideas appropriately for the age group we are working with. It has been a really eye opening experience as I have been forced to really consider developmental processes and stages of mental growth.

This has truly been a demanding and rewarding year academically! I believe the emails below from professors and my College of New Jersey transcripts reveal the fact that I worked hard at attaining the best results possible.