By NVC Faculty Dr. Claudia Verdin
This spring semester we started to have face to face sessions again with the Latino Teacher Academy Learning Community (Latino Talc) students. We are so excited to be working with students who are passionate about K-12 education. Our team is focused on providing academic and personal support to make the pathway to becoming an educator as seamless as possible.
In the Art and Math Lesson Planning led by Dr. Mary Zocchi, students had the opportunity to take a prepared hands-on math lesson which involved art to create a city skyline of buildings filled with multiplication facts. The L-TALC attendees worked in small groups, pretended to be 3rd graders, rolled 10-sided dice to create multiplication facts, and used the array method to find the answer by adding windows to their buildings in a 3 x 4 grid. The L-TALC students discussed ways to support students who were struggling with language, ADHD, small motor skills, visual problems and more. By combining art and math, the college students, pretending to be 3rd graders, discovered many critical thinking and communication skills involved in what appeared to be a very simple lesson.
Dr. Zocchi said, “The more that we (faculty) can expose our future K-12 students to the many methods of teaching, the better our future generations of students will be academically and as critical and creative thinkers.”
The Latino-Teacher Academy Learning Community (Latino-TALC) is a partnership between Northwest Vista College and the Academy for Teacher Excellence Research Center (ATE) at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). We encourage our students to consider becoming certified in one or more of the high-need areas in K-12 education: Bilingual, English as a Second Language (ESL), Special Education, and STEM. The sessions that we are offering this semester are Motivation in Math, Art and Math Lesson Planning, TExES Math Prep, and Teacher Talks Panel as well as several sessions on Social-Emotional Learning and Character Development. The team members of Latino Talc are Dr. Elsa O’Campo, Education faculty, Javier Guerra and Dr. Zocchi both Math faculties, Meredith Hayashi (advisor and grant manager) and Dr. Claudia Verdin who serves as the Principal Investigator of the grant. To learn more about TALC, go here: https://www.alamo.edu/nvc/experience-nvc/current-students/l-talc/