STATEMENT OF TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
I strongly believe in a classroom driven by the students and their choices. My role as an educator stems from the choices my students make every day. I am not just an educator, I am a facilitator, a cheerleader, a coach, and a defender to my students. Every choice they make determines the role I play in their lives. By keeping a growth-mindset about each student and their needs, I can ensure that students grow to be confident, life-long learners.
Student choice can be broken down into four concepts that directly tie into their education. These four areas are (1) student interests (2) comfort levels, (3) mindset, and (4) skill. Although these four concepts may overlap, my goal as an educator is to get to the core of each of these four areas for every student I encounter. These concepts drive choices, and by understanding what drives the choices, I can lead students to make meaningful, confident choices about their education.
The first concept, student interests, relies heavily on being transparent with my students. The more transparent I am about my likes and dislikes, the more transparent my students will be with me. Genuine connections with students allow me to guide them when making choices for topics, projects, and coursework. Furthermore, students’ interests give me insight into the reasoning behind their choices. For example, I once had a student who built the Great Wall of China on Minecraft for a project. His interest in Minecraft was something I had known about prior to the project, and when he found himself struggling to complete the project, I mentioned that he could use a platform like Minecraft to complete his work. Every project after that, he asked if he could use a gaming platform to complete his work. His confidence in later projects was a complete change from the anxious, indecisive student he was before.
The second and third concepts, comfort level and mindset are closely related. Knowing a student’s comfort level allows me to understand the motive behind their actions in class. Similarly, their mindset, whether it’s fixed or growth, helps me understand the challenges they may face as they learn. If a student is uncomfortable with public speaking, they may choose to skip a debate project because it is outside of their comfort zone. Knowing these limits and apprehensions allows me to meet my students in the middle and work with them. This is where students can change from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset with the right scaffolding.
The final concept to take into consideration is a skill. All students are equipped with a certain set of skills. If students are consistently choosing to be the artist in their group projects, that skill allows me to identify the strengths of that student, not just their interests. When I know the strengths of a student, I can use that strength as a way to empower the student to take action in their own learning. Building confidence by playing into their strengths and acknowledging that I see that strength not only helps the student, but it creates a sense of positivity in the classroom environment.
All this stems down to the idea that student choice drives the heart of my profession. Understanding the students on a deeply meaningful level rather than taking them at face value will foster a sense of belonging for both the students and myself. Teaching is not a field where one size fits all. It’s a field where one teacher, a teacher that truly understands and cares about their students as I do, fits the student.
PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY FOR TEACHING ONLINE
#EDU643 #Week3
As a middle school educator in Michigan faced with many uncertainties, I have made a deliberate shift in my perspective and teaching philosophy to better meet the needs of my students, the national crisis, and my own challenges that I face with online learning. I ask my students to reflect on history and its impacts on a daily basis, and now it is time for me to do the same while history writes itself in terms of what the “traditional” classroom looks like. As my philosophy changes, I promise to remind myself every day is a new day to embrace this “new normal.”
The driving force behind this reflectivity is a belief system that will guide me through the ins and outs of education’s shift toward a more online-focused platform, as well as serving as a constant reminder of the pieces that need to be considered while designing and delivering an online course. A base starting belief is to be transparent with me, my colleagues, and my students. As my students and I navigate online learning together, a lot of trial and error will occur. Transparency means sharing my concerns with my students, admitting my mistakes, asking for help, and growing alongside the students, and good modeling of that will lead to a strong, growth-mindset focused online classroom.
To better meet the needs of all my students online, my goal as we shift to online courses is to present learning as a more individualized inquiry-based approach while utilizing many different pieces of technology to make this happen. Michigan’s C3 Framework for Social Studies is built upon the arc of inquiry, and it mandates that inquiry-based learning is the best way for students, especially middle schoolers, to understand history. By asking inquisitive questions and providing numerous opportunities for students to engage in history through personalized technology-based projects, students will mold their experiences in a way that is impactful and authentic.
With my online course, I want to provide a variety of readings (both primary and secondary), interactive field trips (to museums and locations of ancient civilizations), and project-based assessments (with true choice for output) that allow students to individualize whatever historical time period we are currently learning as a way to culminate the learning that occurred in each unit of inquiry. This will be no small task, but I believe that online learning has presented myself and my students with an opportunity to treat every obstacle we encounter as a chance to grow as historians.
To achieve this goal, deliberate planning has to occur to make our classroom a successful online community. A few key components in the planning process are organization and engagement. Organization will be extremely important for me and my students, as it is something that can be challenging with online learning. For me, organization will help keep me accountable. By having unit folders that are organized numerically based on the order we complete the units, as well as following a weekly protocol for posting, teaching, grading, submissions, and feedback, I am working hard to ensure my students are receiving high-quality instruction that they can count on on a weekly basis. Additionally, organization for my students is important as it must be modeled and enforced to ensure academic success. Middle schoolers need a structure to follow. By providing that online by posting weekly introduction videos, holding synchronous instruction on a weekly schedule, and organizing all content into unit folders, I hope that students will be able to utilize our online resources with ease and confidence.
Another component that needs to be taken into consideration is engagement. In my face-to-face classroom, I engage my students through storytelling, in-class simulations, and projects. With the shift online, engagement becomes even more important because students have to become self-motivated to learn and make personal connections to our units of study. Although in-class simulations will be out of the question, I can still achieve storytelling and projects through my LMS and tools such as Zoom or Google Meet. I will also continuously work to engage the students by exposing them to a variety of great resources for Social Studies that can be found online, such as GIS story mapping, virtual field trips to the Himilaya Mountains, visits to the Museum of Natural History, and all the other resources the world wide web has to offer. This will expose my students to a world outside the one they’ve built for themselves.
In the end, every teacher will take a different approach to online learning. By personalizing my philosophy and approach to meet the needs of my content and students, I know that we can power through the challenges we face while making the switch. My strongest asset as a teacher has always been the relationships I make with my students, and that doesn’t have to go away with this shift. It will look different, because we will be taking out the face-to-face element, but I can still build relationships through the way I structure my course. By creating clearly defined expectations from the beginning, maintaining a high-level of authentic social presence, and encouraging student leadership and feedback, I believe that my students and I are headed on an amazing journey equipped with the best online maps and tools the internet can provide.