Personal View of Teaching | Philosophy of Teaching | Classroom Management

WHO ARE TEACHERS? Are you a teacher?

MY PERSONAL VIEW OF TEACHING:

Growing up I never actually gave much thought to teaching. I looked at what my teachers had to go through and teaching didn’t seam like it was worth it. Teachers had to put up with a lot of problem children, and there appeared to be a tremendous amount of work involved. What I didn’t see when I was growing up was the rewards. Looking from the outside, one might judge the profession as an easy way out, and not very rewarding. With what I know now, I can tell you personally, that the rewards of teaching, are far greater than one would imagine. In fact, teaching is probably one of the most honorable, prestigious and rewarding professions out there.

There have been several influences which have opened my eyes to this most rewarding and fulfilling profession. I say profession, because to me, teaching isn’t just a job, it’s a way of life. There have been both good and bad teachers that have inspired me to want to teach, as well as family. How might bad teachers have caused me to pursue this field? Sitting in the classroom staring at my desk and dazing off into wonderland because class was so boring is one reason why I want to teach. Why? Because when I look back I see what not to do in the classroom, and things that all teachers should be doing, that is making the classroom fun and interesting. By teaching, this is one way that I can address that issue, and attempt to make learning enjoyable for everyone.

I’ve had good teachers in both math and other subjects that have inspired me to teach as well. When I look back on those teachers who got me interested in coming to class, there were certain qualities that they had that made them stand out as teachers. Enthusiasm is one quality that was common ground to all of those teachers. When you see a teacher who has passion about the subject they teach, and who is very excited about their subject, then as a student you tend to share that excitement with the teacher. It also tends to make you, as the student, work hard for that teacher in order to excel and impress that teacher. Another quality that stands out is personality. Those teachers who were very active in the classroom and who got to know the students, and who were outgoing, tend to stand out. As a teacher you have to get the students attention and respect. If you don’t see them as equals and interact with them on a personal basis then it is going to be much harder to teach them because they will be more resistance.

Family has also been an influence on my decision to want to teach. My uncle teaches, and my grandfather and his father taught. Looking to them as role models has inspired me to partake on this journey, and not for the sake of carrying on the family tradition, but for the sake of doing something that I love.

Most teachers and pre-service teachers can look back at a particular moment, or a specific aspect in their life that made them decide that they wanted to teach. For me, it was the fact that I enjoy helping people accomplish something that they might otherwise feel is impossible to accomplish by themselves. Seeing someone understand something for the first time and seeing that light bulb click on when they finally understand it is the most rewarding thing in the world. Knowing that you were able to be apart of this person’s life and have an impact on them is something that will stay with you forever. That’s something that no one can take away from you! As a teacher, I feel that I can give back to the community and help contribute to the system. I can be apart of something that has always been apart of me, I just didn’t realize it at first.

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MY PHILOSOPHY OF TEACHING:

There are many different philosophies of education, and ideas about what teaching should be. There’s the idealism approach in which the search for basic meanings and truth is the sole purpose of education. Idealists look beyond the physical world and attempt to explain nonmaterial concepts. There’s the realism approach which emphasizes the importance of habit and instruction, and that everything comes from nature and is subject to natural law. Realism is a more scientific approach to life. Things exist regardless of how we perceive them. Pragmatism deals with the consistent questioning of what is viewed as truth. Knowledge is obtained through experiences and interactions with the environment. Education is defined in terms of the reorganization of these experiences. Existentialism focuses on how individuals interpret the world through feelings, anxiety and choice. Truth is subjective.
In all these different philosophies, there is no one approach that is better than the other, no right or wrong way so to speak. In fact, there are many things from each that are all important to education. I fell that education should not focus on one particular philosophy, but rather a conglomeration of the various concepts and techniques of each. I feel that we too often end up teaching our students one way of looking at the world instead of presenting them with multiple viewpoints in which they can use to develop their own personal and unique approach toward life.

So, what is the purpose of education? I feel that as educators, it is our job to promote independent thinkers and learners who can develop their own approach to learning and life after having been exposed to multiple view points and deciding what’s best for them, and not being told what’s best for them. One way to do this is to promote critical thinking in the classroom. Critical thinking is the questioning and analyzing of different points of views and assumptions and taking learning into ones own hands. Critical thinking is a very student-directed approach and requires a lot of effort on both the students and teachers part. Instead of feeding students information, the students are the ones who decide on an approach to a situation and come up with the information themselves instead of having the teacher give them an answer. Why is this useful? It encourages the student to become active in the learning process, and in that process, it allows the students to explore who they really are and to develop their own approach toward life and learning, their own philosophy of the world.

Is this practical in the classroom? I think that education in today’s society has become too attached to standardized testing and ways in which to compare what a child has learned with someone else so that we can classify them. I think that we have in some way lost touch with what education really is. We have become more prone to teaching students a specific regulated curriculum. That’s not to in any way suggest that the teacher is at fault, but rather it is the system that has become regulated and flawed. In our current system, it is unpractical to employ any one philosophy and to “question” what truth is. How is questioning truth going to help my students excel in math? This is the kind of question that we as teachers face. How can we teach our students the content material that we are required to teach as well as teach them how to question truth and the world around them when it is supposed to be truth that we are teaching them? I’ll be honest; I don’t have an answer or a solution. The only thing that I can suggest is that we re-evaluate the system, and in doing this, keep in mind what it is that we are here to educate for.

WHAT IS YOUR EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY?

Review and consider how strongly you agree or disagree with the following statements. Use this scale to indicate your level of agreement with each idem: 5 = Strongly agree, 4 = Agree, 3 = Neutral, 2 = Disagree, 1 = Disagree Strongly.

_____ 1. The most important role of a teacher is to be a model for intellectual and moral excellence in the classroom.
_____ 2. By studying humans in their natural settings, we can discover universal moral laws.
_____ 3. Although truth is changeable, we can discover it using the scientific method.

_____ 4. The main question teachers should ask students is, “What does this idea or content mean to you?”
_____ 5. Although vocational studies have their place, most students should be required to have a strong liberal arts education.
_____ 6. The most important task for a teacher is to promote reasoning within a particular content area.
_____ 7. The role of the teacher is to engage students in active problem solving applied to social and personal problems.
_____ 8. Truth is subjective and based on personal experiences and beliefs.

_____ 9. There are enduring and unchanging truths and values in all subject areas that students need to understand.
_____ 10. To learn facts and truth in a content area, teachers may need to use considerable drill and practice.
_____ 11. Use of the scientific method is a major goal of education.

_____ 12. The teacher’s primary role is to enable students to create their own values.

_____ 13. Students learn best when they study areas and the works of great people.

_____ 14. There are enduring truths in all subject areas that students can discover by careful reasoning
_____ 15. When deciding what curriculum should be emphasized for students, educators should base their decisions on real-life usefulness of the content.
_____ 16. If forced to choose between covering the content and exploring personal perspectives, a teacher should choose personal exploration.
_____ 17. Time-tested great literary works should be required reading for all students even at the expense of more popular readings.
_____ 18. The curriculum should be based on “the basics” and rely on drill and memorization as learning strategies.
_____ 19. The most important role of the teacher is to facilitate reflection and use the scientific method to solve problems.
_____ 20. The most important concepts to explore with students in the classroom revolve around love, freedom, responsibility, death, and values.
Transfer your scores to this chart and add each column.

Each column represents a specific philosophy of learning: A = idealism, B = realism, C = pragmatism and D = existentialism. The more points you have in each column, the more your own philosophy matches with the established philosophy. The highest possible score for each column is 25, and the lowest is 5. A score of 20 or higher in any column indicates a strong agreement, whereas a score of less than 10 indicates little agreement. Where are your highest scores and where are your lowest? Is your own philosophy highly representative of the classical ways of thinking about education, or do you have a tendency to embrace more than one philosophical stance?

{Survey taken from:
Wiseman, Donna L., Knight, Stephanie L., Cooner, Donna D., Becoming a
Teacher In A Field-Based Setting, An Introduction To Education and Classrooms. 3rd ed. Thomson Wadsworth: Celmont, CA, 2005 (p.60-62)
}

MY EMERGING VIEW OF CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT:

What happens in the classroom is a direct result of what teaching strategy the teacher employs and how the teacher manages and organizes his/her classroom. What is the best way to manage a classroom in order to create the best environment for you students? That all depends on the student’s needs. Not all students learn in the same manner, and not all students learn at the same pace. As a teacher, we have to be flexible, and develop a plan that reflects the types of students that we have in our classroom. There are four areas that we need to consider when trying to create a plan to manage our classrooms.

Learning Environments:
What makes an effective learning environment? Every student is different when it comes to ways in which they learn and process information. Some students are very passive and learn best by taking notes and listening to the teacher. Others learn best when they are more involved and active by participating in classroom discussion. When I was thinking about the most effective environment in which I learn best, I came up with a list of attributes that help to make the learning process more beneficial to me. That environment includes one that is: relaxed; the classroom revolves around open discussion; a student-directed approach is employed; and one where hands-on-interaction is involved. Each of these items, when employed, creates an active environment in which learning, for me, becomes more natural. As a teacher, I wouldn’t rely solely on these approaches, but instead, I would mold the classroom around the students by using their feedback as a means to create the most effective and reliable learning environment for them, and not one that is tailored to myself.

Task-Oriented Behaviors:
Task-orientated behaviors are those which arise as a result of the effectiveness of the teacher. Behaviors such as chatting, waiting, un-involvement, sleeping, etc. could be a result of an ineffective teaching strategy. Perhaps the teacher isn’t getting the students interests, and isn’t involving the students. Some strategies can make a classroom environment seam very boring to a student and they loose interest very quickly. Other behaviors such as: participation, eagerness to learn, visual excitement, etc. are behaviors which may arise as a result of an effective teaching strategy. What we as teachers need to do, is make sure that we choose a strategy that will benefit our students the most. That strategy may change from class to class, but we have to tailor our classroom to fit the students. These task-oriented behaviors can act as clues toward our effectiveness as a teacher, and provide for a means to address and adapt our teaching strategies.

Organization:
There are many ways in which we can organize and manage our classrooms in an effort to create the most reliable and effective learning environment for our students. How might we organize our classroom depends on our goals of instruction. The following are a variety of methods that we can implement to create an effective learning environment in our classroom that can help to meet our goals, keep in mind that these are not the only possibilities, just some of the possibilities: grouping learners, ability grouping, flexible grouping, cooperative grouping, whole class instruction, teacher-student conferences and student pairs. Without getting into the details of each method, keep in mind that there are a variety of different methods that can promote and enhance learning in the classroom. The method that we choose to employ should depend on our students and should be tailored to their needs. We need to choose the method that will create the most effective and most reliable environment for our students, and that method could change for each classroom. Keep in mind that there are advantages and disadvantages to each method, and which method we choose should not be limited to the ones mentioned above.

Classroom Layout:
The physical layout of a classroom is a direct representation of the type of instruction that a teacher is using. A classroom where the seats are arranged in rows and columns typically represents a classroom in which the teacher uses lecture and note taking as the main teaching strategy. This type of classroom can create an environment that is very one-dimensional/directional and non-student directed. Student interaction can be hindered, and some students may try to avoid participation by sitting in the back. On the other hand, the students sitting up front may get all the attention whereas the students in the back are ignored. A classroom where the seats are arranged in a circular type pattern often represents a classroom in which open classroom discussion is encouraged and enforced. In this type of arrangement the teacher can see all of the students, and each student is equally involved. Each student becomes the center of instruction and not just a select group who sit closest to the teacher. When you set up your classroom, look to the needs of your students, and choose layout that will be easily adaptable and flexible

Each of these areas is important when we consider how we will manage our classrooms. I’ll be honest; I don’t have a set plan on how I will manage the classroom when I teach because I won’t know my students needs until I’m in the classroom. What I do know, is that I will be flexible and adapt my classroom to fit my students, keeping in mind that not everyone learns the same way and that I will have to employ different strategies to meet the needs of all of my students.

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