The Art of Teaching

Out of all the educational theorist I have been exposed to, I would say that I look up to Dewey and Piaget. This is mainly due to the ideal that the main take home messages that these two theorists in my opinion truly go hand in hand. John Dewey places such a heavy emphasis on the ideal of hands-on learning. Being a science teacher, I think Life science is a subject in which one has many opportunities to engage students in activities that allow for students to learn the content being taught to them. When it comes to Piaget, he focused heavily on the ideal of having students be engaged in their own learning by utilizing their prior background knowledge to form connections to the new content that students are learning.              Due to me looking up to these theorists so much, I do my best to incorporate these principles into my instruction. For instance, in the first unit of the school year, I had students complete a project in which students...

As we are entering the last quarter of the year (unofficially), I have a few goals for myself. These are to continue building positive rapport, managing my classroom better, and determining how to use questioning better to aide in guiding instruction. During my experiences, I would probably say that the high points are being in the classroom every day. Even if the class was not perfect, it still supplies me with information that a particular component or activity within a lesson does not work. This means for me that there is something out there or a different technique that can be used to relay the same information while also keeping students engaged the entire time. While this has been my first year, there have been many highs and lows for this year. Out of all of my experiences, I would say that would be when I had one student goofing off when getting their goldfish out of the tank for a lab. This resulted in the lid to separate from the container and goldfish were EVERYWHERE. At ...

For my time as a new teacher, we are into the third quarter so I have seen that there has been a decline in the work ethic in my students. Particularly with my Biology kiddos, I sense their feeling of frustration because of the lack of snow days and the consistent five day school weeks. However, there was a day where six consistent students were not doing the right thing (school and classroom policy wise). Normally, I try to give students benefit of the doubt and if they correct their behavior after a warning, I do not always feel the need to call home. However, my students’ behavior persisted which in turn resulted in me calling six parents that day!             When I called each parent, they all were supportive and understood that I care about their child and just want them to be in an environment where they are able to learn in the best environment possible. One parent I called was about phone use, and I just read over th...