Author: aewhitaker

I’m not teaching yet, so this is me and my untried teaching philosophy:

My personal philosophy about creating a productive learning environment for my future students is that learning needs to be fun, or at least interesting to students and to the teacher. When student or teacher lose interest in the subject, chaos ensues. I realize that students learn in many different ways and in order to keep them all on track and help them all to learn effectively, I will have to incorporate many different learning styles into my lessons. I will be teaching science, which can be a very hands on, and therefore very interesting class. These hands on lessons, however can be dangerous, or at least have the potential of being dangerous if students are running about. This is why classroom management is important. I will have to be sure that my students are paying attention and actively involved in demonstrations or experiments. If students are not understanding what is going on, or if they are bored, it can lead to them being disruptive, and possibly causing harm to themselves and others.

I haven’t done my official observation yet, so this is a reflection of one I saw in highschool. The teacher almost always started off class (science ) with some sort of a demonstration or fun/interesting activity. He would then take it through the lesson and honestly, we often ran out of time at the end and would continue it into the next days work, but we were always excited for his class. The first transition was getting us into our seats at the beginning of the class, he handled this by engaging us in the activity that was going on in the front. Sometimes the activity required us to be out of our seats, so getting us back to our seats was the next transition, but for the most part, we liked and respected the teacher enough that if he asked us for something, we did it. The last transition was leaving, the bell system made that easy.   This teacher is one of the main reasons I plan on teaching science. He made it fun and interesting, and even though it seemed disorganized sometimes, I learned more in that one year in his classroom than I think I have since in my college classes. What I really want to be able to apply to my classroom is that he was interested in us. He was interested in what each student liked to do in class and what we did outside of class, and sometimes he would incorporate those things into lessons. We had a group of boys that liked to throw gummies and try to catch them in their mouths, and one day that was part of our physics lesson. He knew the music we liked and who played what sports and how to connect with everyone else. He put the effort into forming relationships with each student that made us want to do our best in his classes.

Video: This video isn’t really a resource per se, it is more of a reminder. This song talked about how the student felt about the teacher, that every smile and showing that she cared about the student helped that student to learn. I think that is so important, and everyone needs a reminder once in a while. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40lVr6MQKtw

Blog: I wanted to post a blog not only about teaching, but about “real life” as well. I think it’s important to remember that we have lives outside of the classroom. That’s what I liked about this blog, it mixes real life with life inside a classroom. https://middle-school-teacher.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2012-06-15T16:24:00-07:00

Website: I thought this website was pretty interesting (and very nicely set up). It gives ways to integrate technology into the classroom, which is and will continue to be, important.   There were things like apps, web, video and photo links. https://www.needleworkseducation.com/

I’m not really sure where I should start with this article. I’m going to try to do this without sounding too harsh or terrible, we’ll see how that goes… My gut reaction was to cringe and clench my teeth when the author was writing about how non-natives were harming their culture and basically should get out of their business. That’s because I am not a native. I have never been in that situation. One of the comments on the article said that culture is something that should be taught at home, and in some ways I agree with that. In elementary and highschool, my parents wanted me to learn from a Christian perspective, so they taught me at home. They also put me into a Christian school. I know this isn’t the same as the Native situation, but there are other ways of educating the children about their culture other than telling the non-Natives to “get out”. For the most part, I don’t think that the non-Native teachers are teaching to steal the Native culture or to put them down. There are other options. Culture can be integrated into the classroom, it can be taught at home, or if a family is particularly dissatisfied with the public school system they can homeschool. That is one of the great things about our country, our state is that we have that choice. I think that if the culture is integrated into the classroom it would be most beneficial if the Natives came into the classroom to teach, so that the non-Native teachers that are not familiar with Native custom and culture can learn as well.

In developing rules, I think that it is very important to make sure that the students understand why they have rules. I was always a student that wanted to know why something worked the way it did, or why we couldn’t tip backwards in our chairs, having that explanation usually made it more relevant to me and I was more likely to follow the rule.

I really liked the idea of letting the students develop their own classroom rules. I think that would allow them to feel that they have some control over their own learning environment. Having rules and expectations for the classroom are important because they give a sense of stability to the classroom atmosphere. That stability allows for the students to know what to expect and know that they can be safe in that expectation.

The basic idea of the rules I would want set up in my classroom are:

1. Treat others the way you want to be treated.

2. Follow instructions.

3. Respect- yourself, teachers,   your classmates and anyone else you come in contact with.

4. Learning is fun, enjoy it!

This website that I found was interesting because it not only gave examples of how to make the rules of the classroom, but also how to deal and not deal with any breaking of these rules.

https://www.education.ne.gov/BMIT/pdf/EstablishingClassroomRulesandConsequences.pdf