Spring Semester
When reading over my teaching philosophy from last semester, I still believe that a lot of those rules and ideas are true today. Making sure that my classroom is a safe environment for my students, having respect for my students, and that all students learn in different ways are all very important to have in a teaching philosophy. But as I have grown as an inspiring educator and have learned more about teaching, I would like to add some new ideas to my teaching philosophy.
One big idea about teaching is knowing how to keep students engaged in what you are teaching. We all know that there are some students who just do not want to be at school, they do not want to learn, and they find no motivation of being there. So as a teacher, it is our responsibility to not only teach the students what they need to know, but also do it in a way that is engaging. In class we read a book called Why Don’t Students Like School?, and on page 7 it talks about how we as humans “are naturally curious people.” So when we are teaching students, especially the younger grade levels, the students are going to be curious about all sorts of things. It is our responsibility as teachers to keep those students engaged in the lesson, help them expand their curiosity, while also teaching them the skills they need in order to succeed.
To go off of my last point of engaging students, it is important to connect concepts that students can relate to to the lessons that you are teaching. This will not only help keep the students engaged, but it will also help them understand and remember the information a lot faster. For example, “having background knowledge helps us overcome the working memory limitations because it allows us to group or ‘chunk’ pieces of info.” (pg. 149) So as a teacher, you need to be able to read your students, know what types of background knowledge they already have, and then try to connect that background knowledge to new concepts. By doing that, the students will be able to retain the information a lot better.
In my teaching philosophy from the fall semester, I talk about how all students are willing to learn, but they all learn in different ways, at different paces. I want to expand on that. In the text we read, chapter one talks about ways that teacher can implicate the concepts talked about into their classroom. One key point brought up in the text was to “respect students’ cognitive limits” and “people can only keep so much in mind.” (pg. 18) With that being said, each student is different when it comes to cognitive limits and what they can remember. One student may be really good at remembering all their time tables in their brain, where as another student might only be able to hold half the information at a time. So as a teacher, knowing that students remember things at different paces is important. Not all students are the same.
As teachers, everything is changing. We are always learning, growing and trying to tweak different things to make our teaching better. The teaching philosophy that I wrote in the fall and then this one I just wrote are both great examples of seeing how as teachers, our ideas are always changing.
