Commentary of Artifact 3

Course Reflection - CEP891 Summer 2014

Standards: 1, 3
Goals: 1, 2,
This is the reflection of CEP891, the course I took in summer 2014. The course was
about adolescents, such as their thinking patterns, common questions about them, their
physical and psychological growing and their relationship with people.
By learning this course, I had a new angle of thinking about students and their behavior.
There are some common patterns of adolescents problems and each one has some
reasons behind it. In addition to taking actions from the teacher side, we should also
think from the student side. Trying to understand students, figuring out why they are
behaving like this and taking actions accordingly should be necessary components of a
teachers work. This reflection helped me to have a clear thinking about my students as
adolescents and worked as a direction to my future teaching.

Course Reflection

The course about child development is about to end. The most important thing
I learned is that I have to learn more. There are a lot of helpful theories about
the rules of childrens development, for example, Piagets stages of cognitive
development. These theories well explained childrens behavior in different
periods of growth and can help people to understand children better. However,
the theories are complex and need some background knowledge to understand.
It is hard to thoroughly master these theories by just reading this text book. I
should learn more about these theories by reading other books.

Along with reading book, I did some case analyses using the concept I read in
the book. This is even more helpful than reading book. The cases are all from
real world and are similar to some situations I encountered in my classroom.
When using the concepts in the book to analyze the cases, I not only
understood the theories better, but also deeply thought about how to deal with
such kind of situations. I learned the good ways teachers in the cases handle
the problems, and tried to find my own way that I think in which problems could
be better solved.

We, as teachers, all have the experience of handling students problems. When
we are trying to solve the problems, we try to understand the reason why
children have such problems, too. We dont always find out the real reasons,
so we fail to solve the problems sometimes.

In the text book, the author gave a lot of theories to explain childrens behaviors
in many aspects. It helps a lot. I now understand that there are many things
influence childrens development. Sometimes we see a childs behavior, but the
reason why he/she has this behavior may be complex.

Take one aspect for instance, we all know people influence each other. By
reading the text book, I understand not only that children are influenced by
people around them, such as parents, teachers and friends, but also the way
they influence children. We can gain from the concepts as teachers since we
may understand students better. We can also gain from the concepts as parents
(in the future), since we know that parents have crucial influence on children
and we know how parents influence their children.

There are couple of concepts impressed me. I would like to talk about these
concepts and try to make an action plan to apply these concepts to my teaching.

1. Gender is one of the main reasons that affect child development.

It is common sense that boys and girls are different. But I didnt know how boys
and girls are different in different stages of growth and in different aspects. This
book gave some concepts about this topic.

For example, there are gender differences in play. According to A. Campbell

(2002), boys spend more time than girls in play groups of five or more children
and in competitive play. Girls are more likely than boys to engage in arts and
crafts and domestic play. Girls activities are more closely directed and
structures by adults.

This gives directions to our classroom activity designing. When designing

games and activities in class, we should keep in mind that boy and girls have
different playing types. Some kinds of activities like drawing pictures maybe
popular in girls but may not be accepted by boys. Also, boys may like physical

activities more than girls. If we consider the differences and design different
activities according to boys and girls preference, the class will be more efficient
and engaging.

2. Peer influence is very important in a childs growing process.

We all have friends and most of us consider friends as an important part in our
lives. We also know that friends influence each other a lot, but according to the
textbook, friendship is one of the types of childrens relationship. Other types of
relationship could be peer groups, dating and romantic relationships and online
social. Each type of relationship has influences on children.

We also have to keep in mind that there may be good influence and bad
influence. Parents and teacher should pay attention to this and give necessary
support when needed. As a teacher, it is important to make sure the classroom
environment is positive in case students are badly influenced. There should be
some items of classroom rules to give consequences to bad behaviors and
encourage good behaviors. Students will influence each other positively if they
take the good behavior as appropriate things to do.

Another thing I should consider about students friendship is that most of the
times, friends should not be sitting together. I have the experience of letting two
close students sit together and found them talked a lot in class. I should try to
find out which students are friends in my class and arrange their seats to let
them sit in different tables, so they may not have chance to talk to each other.

3. Self-esteem
Self-esteem is an important aspect of self-concept. It is the value or worth that

people attach to themselves. Middle school students are in the process of

building their self-concept. It is crucial how they think of themselves. On one
hand, as mentioned in the book, for most adolescents, low self-esteem
produces temporary discomfort. For others, low self-esteem has serious
psychological and behavioral consequences. On the other hand, According to
Costigan(2007) and Soenens (2007), adolescent who feel that they are highly
regarded by family and friends are more likely to have positive feelings about
themselves then are those who feel they are lacking such support. Also, as
mentioned in the book, emotional support from parents and peers is important
in the development of self-esteem during adolescence. Teacher, undoubtedly,
is important, too.

There concepts give teachers directions of dealing with students emotional

problems. I should always remember that teachers have influence on students
emotion and may affect their self-esteem. I should adjust my communication
with students, to help students build high self-esteem by encouraging them,
even they dont meet my expectations. This is similar to what I learned first
about education, teachers should have high expectation on students. If we dont
believe our students could do well, we can do nothing to help them to do well.

I could not imagine what a class it will become if all students have high selfesteem about themselves and want to be better. That is what a teacher dream
of.

4. Childhood depression and childhood anxiety

These two emotional problems are not rare among children. We could often
see some students depressed. According to American Psychiatric Association
(2000), depressed children in middle childhood engage in less social activity

and have poorer social skills than peers. It is not hard to find out students who
are suffering childhood depression in class. What we have to do is to help them
out in appropriate ways. As suggested in the book, we can involve children in
enjoyable activities, encourage the development of skills, offer praise when
appropriate and point out when children are being too hard on themselves.

Children anxiety is also emotional problem often found among students.

Sometimes I can see students tired of study and being at school. They dont
want to study and often ask to leave the classroom. I also had a student who
was often absent since she was in my first hour class and she was often late to
attend school. I believe she was suffering school phobia or school refusal.

To learn about childhood depression and childhood anxiety helps lot in

understanding and dealing with students emotional problems. Depression and
anxiety may help us to find out the reasons of students problems, as well as
the way to solve the problems. I used to blame those students who seemed
tired of class and classroom activities, but I would like to try to learn more about
those students after reading the chapter of childhood depression and childhood
anxiety. I would like to find out the reasons of their depression and anxiety and
try to help them. After all, blame helps little and it doesnt solve the problems.