My Philosophy on Teaching

In reflecting on my time teaching and taking graduate course, I have acquired my own set of moral and ethics when it comes to assessing students. I think that the most important thing is to be relatable, impartial, and having students being physical and not always having a sedentary class period. Students should be assessed on their knowledge in various ways that allow them to be creative and engaged.

When trying to assess student, as the teacher, you want to be able to determine whether your students are picking up what you are teaching. Are my students retaining the information? Is there something that my students aren’t understanding? What can I do to clarify any misunderstandings and relate this to my students? These are all questions that I ask myself when I give my students a formative assessment. I think that to be a good teacher you need to be able to relate. I have had more success by having my lessons relating back to something physical the students can do or construct than pen and paper note taking and sedentary activities. I also find ways to relate to my students through their interests and career goals, for example by relating my quadratics unit to basketball and projectile motion that you would see in physics. I have also seen vast improvement on my student’s summative assessment scores at the end of the units.

Formative and performance assessments I find to be very useful in my classroom. Formative assessments allow me to track student knowledge and check for understanding. I can take this data and alter lessons or review necessary skills needed for concepts moving forward in a unit. By being impartial and fair with grading, my students are more motivated to succeed because they know that I am not just going to give them a good grade because I like them more. I do not let emotions get in the way of how I grade their work. Giving them immediate feedback, help them to also see where they are making mistakes and where they need to improve. Giving performance assessment, motivate and engage my students because they can construct something that relates to things outside of the classroom. They can demonstrate their knowledge through something that interests them and does not give the stressors that come with taking a test.

In increasing student engagement, there are many technologies that I have tried, and I would like to incorporate in the future. I have used sites such as Khan Academy, that allow my students to have video lessons, additional resources, and practice exercises with immediate feedback. I have also used applications, such as Kahoot! that I have found to be helpful when doing knowledge checks because they again give immediate feedback and allow the students to use their phones. Technologies I would like to incorporate are Nearpod and Desmos because they are able to provide more interactive lessons that a plain old PowerPoint cannot. Students can get the immediate feedback and have a digital copy of a lesson to refer to if necessary.

I think that the Experiential Learning Theory is one that I can most relate to and has helped me in my classroom. Students relate and remember things that they can experience. If a student does not see how a math skill can be used outside the classroom, they tend to not be as motivated to want to learn the material. I have created lessons that relate to projectile motion for the quadratics unit using basketball analogies and carnival games to teach probability. In my first-year teaching, I had no prior experience, so I went with teaching how I was taught when I was in high school which was mostly lectures. I noticed my students were more talkative to their neighbors and on their phones as I was trying to teach them material. When I hit about the second quarter, teaching in that manner just was not effective, so I began to try teaching with different mediums and trying to relate more to what the students were interested in. I had my students actively doing explorations and experiments that they may have seen or experienced outside the classroom, which helped to improve their engagement in my lessons.

Creating a philosophy for how I think one should teach is hard to say because there are so many factors that play into how students learn. There are those that are inside and outside the classroom as well as many different types of disabilities that play a role. With adapting to my students, being fair, unbiased, consistent and relatable have given me the most success in my current teaching environment. I do not sugar coat anything with them and I remain transparent. I find things that my students show interest in and I run with those ideas in creating effective and engaging lessons. I think that my philosophy most closely relates to Experiential Learning because many of my students learn better through the things in their lives they experience.

Fairness with Assessment

When creating assessments, it is important to be fair. Each student should have an equally likely chance to succeed and demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of the unit content. I believe that students must be engaged and motivated in lessons, have a safe, comfortable learning environment, and be able to relate to the material. All of these things play into being to able fairly assess students.

 I believe it is the responsibility of the educator to teach the students in a way they can relate and understand the material. If the educator cannot teach in a way that it is relatable to the students, should the blame be put onto the students for not performing on their assessments? I think it is the educators responsibility to make the content relatable. A student is not going to be encouraged to learn something they cannot totally understand. Relating lessons to things that students show interest in makes the topic more memorable. For example, when teaching quadratic functions, I used a lot of basketball and football analogies to better explain the topic because there was a culture of basketball and football in the school. I also created a lab, where students were able to catapult different objects and diagram its motion.

In addition to making the lessons relatable, the learning environment must be comfortable and safe. The students must feel safe to make mistakes as they learn new material. If a student does not feel like they can make a mistake, then it will be impossible for them to learn. Students must also feel comfortable with the educator and their classmates to share answers and collaborate.

In making my own assessments as fair as possible, I need to ensure that the questions that I am asking are clear and concise. They need to be specific to what I am looking for and align with expectations. I also need to ensure that the questions match the content that was actually taught and are worded in a way that matches what the students are familiar with. The assessment needs to have multiple types of questioning and at the end of each assessment I want to add a reflection piece so I can also get feedback about the unit, so I can teach it better the following year and alter my future lessons. Bias in questioning needs to be eliminated, so that there is a leveled playing field for all.

Being an educator, I have been able to reflect on things that I did in my first year that might have not been as fair when assessing students. Though I have tried to make my assessments mirror to what was learned, I may have relied more on students knowing my expectations in giving directions. I always made my directions brief and to the point, but then when grading students may not have put all the information I am looking for to give them full points. I should have made my directions specific in order to be able to say that this or that was not done to answer the questions properly. I need to review my assessments and make sure I am giving everyone an equal chance in order to effectively assess their knowledge and my ability to teach material as well.