Teaching Philosophy

           

            I, as a future educator, hope to implement three mentalities into my classroom that will hopefully aid in helping my students learn more efficiently. These mentalities are that students learn the best when they are interested, students should understand prerequisite material, and that efficient use of class time will keep students engaged.

           

            Students often ask, “will we ever need this?” as a veil to cover the question “if I’m not going to use this, why should I care?” A problem with this question is that educators only answer with a threat, (if you don’t learn this you will fail XYZ) or that this material is a prerequisite for another topic that the student still will not care about. Moving away from the ideas of the cognitive revolution, the public education system was set up on this conveyor-belt-mentality that has not adapted to the modern demands of the free market and until the material that is required to be taught lines up better with a rapidly evolving market the answer to these child’s questions needs to reflect this reality. I plan on using real life situations in my classroom that reflect current applicability to all instances, implemented through homework and class assignments.

 

            Another problem that I have come across is that students know how to produce an answer without knowing what that answer means, how they got there, or how to apply the same “logic” in a different situation. Much like classrooms observed in Brazil by Freire, I believe that the right answer with no understanding of a meaning is worthless and schools should not be rewarding that. I plan on fixing this as much as possible with clicker questions and polls during lectures that ask about the current topic in simple but multi-angled ways to train students’ ability to re-purpose and adeptly apply different interpretations as a means of multipurpose mastery.

 

            There is little debate about how inefficient teachers in high school are with class time, taking up time to grade papers without explanation, reading from textbooks, doing repetitive practice problems, or even being complacent with students ignoring them. Drawing from an article about the potential advantages of student incentives, it has been documented that teachers who find the correct “bribes” to their students often find a more receptive ear when it comes to their lecture. I plan on using additional lessons as my incentives, once a lesson is complete, I plan on using the rest of the class going over test question examples that are essentially the same as the ones on the test. This will allow a constant motivation to get through the lesson quickly as the more time they have at the end of a class the more questions we can get through and the more review for the tests (which will be difficult as I plan on teaching primarily AP classes) the students get. Additionally, as I recognize that students do need breaks, I hope to find at a regular frequency the time needed for “life” lessons. These lessons will hopefully be interesting to the students as it may be the first time in their lives they get to think about or work with some of these materials. These lessons would include topics like; how to change a tire, how to set up a full electrical network for a treehouse, how to build your own wireless charger, etc. These topics could be applied to units in class (torque, electricity, magnetism) but I only plan on doing them sparingly as this is meant to be a reward for efficient use of my class time.