This month’s showcase teacher is Matt Anderson of the Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) in Pittsburgh. Matt began using the Civic Mirror at The Urban Assembly School of Design and Construction in New York City, he then took a position teaching education methods at CCAC where he continues to use the Civic Mirror. Matt uses CM to expose education students to new and innovative ways to instruct and keep kids engaged in learning.
Through Matt’s tutelage these education students are learning valuable lessons about innovative teaching methods in the classroom. Research proves that what teachers are exposed to and use in the first four years of teaching predicts what they’ll continue to do for the rest of their career.
In Matt’s CCAC country of Beautopia he made great use of the online discussion forums, posing questions and assignments for his student teachers. By using the forum he not only opened the door for great discussions, but also exposed them to an cutting edge teaching and learning tool.
For example, Matt challenged his students to do the following:
“As educators, it’s our job to create learning experiences that promote student understanding and there’s no better way to do this than using material that relates to the students.
Your assignment is to create a lesson using connections from the Civic Mirror. Make sure to be specific and include examples so we know what you are trying to do!”
His students’ ideas were fantastic:
Natalya would use CM in a science class for a unit on geography to emphasize how human actions affect our environment: “They [the students] would try to make businesses into trees and such. They would do activities on how in real life this affects the earth and the life living on it. Then, they would do the opposite. They would destroy all green hexes and see how that affected them. They would look into what we are doing to the environment by destroying rainforests and farming on land and depleting it of its value. They would then compare and contrast what they discovered.”
Bunny, a congress member in Beautopia, would use the Civic Mirror in an English course: “Civic Mirror would be a great tool to use for an English Unit in which students would monitor the game experiences and write several personal reflections regarding emotional effects of humanistic behavior, personal beliefs on government control as well as a predictive paper on hidden agendas.”
Both Natalya and Bunny “get it,” students learn better when they:
a) experience what they’re learning, and
b) reflect on how what their learning relates to their life and the world they live in.
Kudos to Matt for promoting educational change for the next generation of teachers!
