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End of Program Reflection

Mandi Urgo
University of Saint Mary

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End of Program Reflection

The Master of Art in Teaching program, from the University of Saint Mary, has instilled
the need to be a continued researcher, as well as an educator. I feel this will benefit me in the
future of my career because it will make me a strong and confident educator through the
implementation of research. Implementing new instructional strategies through research will
also demonstrate my leadership skills by training my colleagues during PLCs for benefit of their
instructional practices.
Although the MAT coursework was challenging at times, I was mostly surprised about
my graduate level papers. Writing has not always been a strong area for me, which made me feel
intimidated when initially beginning the MAT program. After reading through my papers, I feel
it is strong enough to be considered graduate level writing.
The initial content consisted of developing an action research project that I could
implement into my current classroom. First, I had to decide on a topic to research. I
immediately thought of how to increase comprehension through the subject area of science in my
gifted classrooms. Through research of professional, scholarly research articles, I identified the
instructional strategy of the 21st century skill of problem-based learning. PBL allows students to
focus on an open-ended question or task, apply original ideas to content application, and to
analyze content independently.
I developed a pre-test on the given subject area content that was to be instructed at the
time. The pre-test will serve as quantitative data because it is a formal instrument. The pre-test
scores allowed me to see what knowledge each student had about the given subject area. This
data drove my instruction so that I began instructing at an area that was appropriate for my class.

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I also developed a rubric to evaluate the comprehension and effort that was displayed in the
resulting lesson. After completion of the lesson, I then administered the pre-test to each student,
which then also served as the post-test. The comparisons of the scores on the pre-test and posttest data were reflected on a line graph to demonstrate the improvement of comprehension of
each student. The data from the rubrics were demonstrated on a separate line graph illustrating
the level of criteria that was met for each student. After the development, implementation, and
assessment of my action research plan, the result was immediate and comprehension in the
subject area of science was evident and increasing.
As a result of my coursework in the MAT program, I feel I grew the most professionally
through research. Research played a significant role throughout my coursework. I believe that I
learned how to benefit my students by effectively researching and implementing instructional
strategies in my classroom.