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About the Author
Thanks for checking out my work! I am very enthusiastic about keeping learning engaging and authentic! My name is Sarah Martinez and I am a 7th year teacher that has dabbled in several different classroom settings. I spent 4 years teaching self-contained middle school. I taught fine arts for a year, worked as an instructional coach, and I am now looking forward to returning to the arts but this time I will be teaching digital and media arts! I am most excited about this position because it allows me to teach what I love.
One thing that has stayed consistent across all my teaching environments is my love for hands on, engaging learning. I love to incorporate project-based learning and I always find ways to provide my students authentic tasks that engage students and require higher-order thinking. I am passionate that learning needs to shift away from the traditional lecture and test model and towards an interactive, authentic environment that reflects the skills necessary for success in the 21st-century! For this reason, I chose to pursue my master's degree in Innovative Learning through Touro University. I was happy to find a program that specifically focused on my educational ideals.
When I am not teaching I am love spending time with my family, training Brazilian JiuJitsu, eating sushi, and getting outside!
One thing that has stayed consistent across all my teaching environments is my love for hands on, engaging learning. I love to incorporate project-based learning and I always find ways to provide my students authentic tasks that engage students and require higher-order thinking. I am passionate that learning needs to shift away from the traditional lecture and test model and towards an interactive, authentic environment that reflects the skills necessary for success in the 21st-century! For this reason, I chose to pursue my master's degree in Innovative Learning through Touro University. I was happy to find a program that specifically focused on my educational ideals.
When I am not teaching I am love spending time with my family, training Brazilian JiuJitsu, eating sushi, and getting outside!
Reflections on my Journey
Since day one of student teaching, I have been passionate about hands-on, project-based learning. I was fortunate to have a mentor teacher that was a master of this type of teaching. As I progressed into my own teaching practice, I continued to create lessons that encouraged problem solving, creativity, and mimicked real world tasks. I have always prided myself in my ability to develop authentic tasks and assessments, even before I became familiar with the terminology and research.
I knew entering this program that I wanted to focus on my passion, which is breaking away from the age-old model of education. I feel strongly that we need to reinvent education to step away from worksheets, lectures, and traditional tests. I knew I wanted to conduct research that contributed to this shift, but it took some navigating to really land on my specific question.
In the midst of developing my study and completing course work, I gave birth to my daughter. This definitely complicated the process, but did not halt it. After playing with the idea of researching Project-Based Learning, I found it was a heavily researched topic. I also began to consider that what I really wanted to focus on was utilizing projects and authentic tasks as a way for students to synthesize and demonstrate their knowledge. And so I landed on Authentic Assessment. I still had to refine my question because there is also much research proving that students learn "more" through authentic tasks. I wanted to dive deeper. I wanted to examine not just quantity of learning, but quality of learning. This led me to my final direction, which was examining the depth of knowledge achieved through authentic assessment vs. traditional assessment.
Conducting the study itself was a whole journey. Maternity leave left me returning with a very strict time crunch, and my inquiry cycles could not be shortened any further. I also had the challenge of having to conduct research via another teacher's class. This made collecting data a bit more complicated. In the end, it came together, even if it was down to the last day of school.
I knew entering this program that I wanted to focus on my passion, which is breaking away from the age-old model of education. I feel strongly that we need to reinvent education to step away from worksheets, lectures, and traditional tests. I knew I wanted to conduct research that contributed to this shift, but it took some navigating to really land on my specific question.
In the midst of developing my study and completing course work, I gave birth to my daughter. This definitely complicated the process, but did not halt it. After playing with the idea of researching Project-Based Learning, I found it was a heavily researched topic. I also began to consider that what I really wanted to focus on was utilizing projects and authentic tasks as a way for students to synthesize and demonstrate their knowledge. And so I landed on Authentic Assessment. I still had to refine my question because there is also much research proving that students learn "more" through authentic tasks. I wanted to dive deeper. I wanted to examine not just quantity of learning, but quality of learning. This led me to my final direction, which was examining the depth of knowledge achieved through authentic assessment vs. traditional assessment.
Conducting the study itself was a whole journey. Maternity leave left me returning with a very strict time crunch, and my inquiry cycles could not be shortened any further. I also had the challenge of having to conduct research via another teacher's class. This made collecting data a bit more complicated. In the end, it came together, even if it was down to the last day of school.