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.

Views on Standardized Testing

Standardized tests have been around for over 100 years. They have been used to check student abilities to ensure they are up to the standards of the state and country. I find that there may have been some benefits in the past, but after being on both sides of standardized testing as a student and teacher in the same county, I am starting to lean more toward being against them. I think that they effect students and teachers negatively and portray the nations youth poorly.

As a student, I was always pushed by my parents to do my best. They did not give me choices on my future after high school; the only option I had was going to college. Growing up and not having much money to afford going to college, I felt the added pressure from my parents to do well in school. Part of doing well in school and being able to get scholarships and grants, was having to do well not only in classes, but on the standardized tests. The pressure was immense being only in my teens, causing me to become overly stressed and having constant mood swings with my family members. It also did not show how good of a student I was at the time. Like in my classes, I did well on everything I was taught, but was not the best when it came to taking tests because there was an added pressure. When I took the SATs, I scored low on the reading and writing portions, but I was an A student in my English classes. Looking back now, I do not think that my test scores really show how brilliant of a student I was.

As an educator in the same county I once went to school in, I can see another viewpoint when it comes to standardized tests. The feelings and struggles mentally that I endured while testing is also demonstrated by my students. I have students consistently missing class due to testing, which makes it difficult for them to keep up with the material after testing for 3 plus hours. It takes a told on their mental capacity. I had a student the other day come to me about their grade because they had to take almost every standardized test, so they could graduate, in turn missing almost a month’s worth of assignments. My student seemed very stressed and down because he was basically put into a whole with my class and others. By the time they had a moment to get caught up to some extent, there were only 2 days left in the quarter. I try to be understanding in that these tests are mandatory and that they serve a purpose that I just cannot wrap my head around, but what it is doing to students in the population I teach is unfair. Many students just sit for the test or do not take it at all because they have other means of getting the credit for it to graduate. There are projects students can take in place of standardized tests if they have failed them more than once, but students where I teach take advantage of that, making the days that they are getting pulled to test a waste of time that they could have been in class learning the material and not falling behind.

I know I may not understand the full meaning of standardized testing and what it may do for our nation, but I am 100% against it. I do feel that I may be very biased on this topic, but I have gone through the struggle and I see what my students go through as well. The amount of money that these tests costs are wasted on schools like the one I teach at because these students are not dumb and know they can get out of taking or passing a test by doing a project. The school system is allowing this to happen making it even more frustrating that a whole month and a half plus is dedicated to testing students back to back. I think that for students, there should be an alternative means of testing their abilities to pass certain subjects. In giving students some other form of summative assessment like the projects alone, I believe would help the demonstrate cumulative knowledge and mastery of a topic. Not all students excel in the same fields so by allowing them to do a creative project or something that they can use to show they know the subject should be enough in telling if a student is up to standards.