Standard #9 Rationale In the spring of 2013, I was in the course ED 338: Early Childhood Curriculum.

One of the projects we were asked to do was go to another school that had a different approach to teaching children. For example, we had to choose between a Montessori school, a Waldorf school, and a Reggio Emilia school. I was in the group that went to a Montessori school. The InTASC Model Core Teaching Standard number nine is about teachers evaluating themselves. This means evaluating what they do or teach and how it affects their students, parents, community and how they grow as a teacher themselves. I choose this project as an example for this standard because I feel that this was an opportunity to help myself grow as a teacher. I grew up attending private schools the majority of my life. Attending these schools I saw basically the same structure of teaching from almost every teacher. I enjoyed observing and asking questions about the structure of teaching in a Montessori school. The way of teaching, the environment and the classroom management was different from what I have grown up seeing in the schools I attended. It was fascinating to see how the students interacted with each other and with the teachers in the room. One of the classrooms I was able to observe in was an early childhood room. I was amazed by how these young students were able to do more than what I would have expected from them. For example, there was a young girl, probably around the age of five, who was writing her spelling words in cursive. When I attended elementary school, students did not learn cursive until at least second grade. This project helped open my eyes to see that there are more possibilities to teaching children. There are three Alverno Education Abilities that I feel that are shown in this project. The diagnosis ability is the observations I seen during my visit to the Montessori school. My observations helped me grow as a teacher and open my eyes to other styles of teaching. Conceptualization is shown by research my group had to do to find the background history on Montessori schools. The group I worked with did research on how these types of schools started and the theorist behind it. For example, we found out that Maria Montessori was the person who started these schools. Our group also felt that there were other theorist, such as Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, which were influences to the structure of these schools. We felt that there was Piagets theory on the stages of child development because of how the classrooms were set up. There were set up by the childrens age group and human development. We felt that Vygotskys theory on Zone of Proximal Development was shown by how the students build up to the point of working independently in their classrooms. The third ability I see in this project is coordination because we were able to use another school as a resource to see that there are other teaching styles. We were able to go to the school to observe the classrooms and ask the teachers questions. We were also able to use the Alvernos library to watch a video on the structure of a Montessori school.