My teaching philosophy...
Anyone with open eyes and ears can detect that in the world we live in, there is a lot of room for improvement. I believe that the greatest changes take time, but every great change requires a catalyst. I believe that every person has something to contribute to the betterment of society. Whether your passions lie in conserving the environment, reducing poverty, spreading awareness, ironing-out politics, and so forth-- it is our greatest responsibility to pursue our passions and help shape whatever change should occur.
As a teacher, I believe it is my greatest responsibility to help students discover their passions and realize how significant their actions are. I believe in the power of choice. You can choose to smile, be friendly, be timely and to be respectful or you can choose the opposite. Beyond revealing passions and teaching mathematics,.. it is a teacher's highest priority to help students understand the implications of every decision they make and simultaneously show them that it is okay to make mistakes so long as they know how to rise above them.
Lastly, but absolutely foremost, I believe in leading by example. Every teacher should live their lives as if they were being watched by their students in every moment. We should never stop learning, and we should always be applying what we have learned through out the course of our lives.
My goals and aspirations...
I described my fundamental objectives within my teaching philosophy. In order to teach these character principles, I plan to use social media such as blogging, twitter, google, and other WEB 2.0 tools to increase my students technological literacy, exchange teaching strategies, and enable cultural exchanges.
The more a teacher can safely expose their students to, the more opportunities their students will have to discover their passions. If I recommend they watch a classic movie that might build character or reveal social enigmas, they might discover their interests in film by witnessing first-hand the power of quality movies. I hope to also establish connections between students around the world and my own so that my class can see what they should appreciate about their own experiences and what they could strive to gain; this in conjunction with a government lesson might help them discover their fire for politics or ambassador work.
The possibilities are endless, but it all boils down to reaching beyond the classroom walls into the lives of others and seeing what my students find. I want them to be able to do this with a variety of tools and I plan to employ books, technology, media, and community engagement to do so.
Dealing with Disabilities
Throughout this semester, each of my education classes have asked me to reflect on all the work that I have completed. The most impacting assignment that I did was an in class activity where we were handicapped by socks on our hands, blindfolds, wheelchairs, tongue-depressors in our mouth, and jumbled letters on a reading assignment. It taught us to see the world through the eyes of students who have disabilities, and I developed a better understanding of what those challenges entailed. I plan to incorporate a similar lesson into my lesson plan because I see the importance of having my students recognize the courage that it takes to stay involved at school while learning to cope with a handicap.
Your lesson plan is a great idea to help classmates of students with disabilities to develop empathy.
ReplyDeleteI have a poster on my wall that I made, that reads " Fair does not mean that everyone gets the same thing. Fair means that everyone gets what he or she NEEDS.
Kids understand this. And I've found that having this right out in the open, and saying "yes, sometimes so and so will just get to leave the room when he or she needs to, because that's what he/she needs, but you my friend may not" or whatever the situation is, using calculators, sitting on yoga balls, getting to write on the computer...