Teaching Philosophy

Through my UTeach internship, I was able to work with students from lower socioeconomic groups. Working with these students allowed me to recognize that each student has different needs, traits, and values that have been sculpted by their background and culture. This experience inspired me to teach students to support their individual differences, so they feel that their thoughts are valuable and develop skills that can be used outside the classroom.

Through my experience, I have found that students learn best through cooperative learning. Students come from different cultural backgrounds and some may speak different languages. This impacts how they think, remember and communicate which affects how they learn. When students are put into structured groups, a smaller and safer space is created for students to share different ideas while working towards completing a task. This strongly supports Vygotsky’s learning theory where he strongly viewed speech as a tool that students use to learn, solve, and understand new concepts. By putting students in structured groups, they can exercise autonomy over their learning and are given flexibility on how they approach each problem or task. Having each student share and explain their thought process helps others learn by giving them the opportunity to introduce ideas, resolve conflicting concepts, and collaborate.

In coordination with cooperative learning, I think students best learn when responsive teaching is used. Responsive teaching allows students to use their prior knowledge to learn new content. This creates an opportunity for students to encounter disequilibrium, a concept in Piaget’s cognitive development theory. When new information does not fit by assimilating information into past schemas, they have to revisit their initial thought and critically think and reason to make sense of the new information. This leads to the act of accommodation. Revoicing, a method of responsive teaching, can help students with disequilibrium. Having a student’s response be repeated back to them allows them to hear the interpretation of their thoughts so they can expand, clarify, and reconstruct their ideas. The teacher is also able to introduce new vocabulary and model how to converse in academic conversations which is an important skill students can outside of the classroom. Responsive teaching also allows students to connect their in-school and out-of-school learning. When students’ pre-existing knowledge of the everyday world is used inside the classroom, they are able to create a strong understanding of the topic and apply it to new ideas. This creates a fusion of in-school learning and out-of-school learning ultimately helping them cultivate their reasoning and knowledge about the everyday world. Additionally, Teachers can be responsive to the student’s ideas, backgrounds, and social and physical needs. Doing so helps a student’s individual needs to be met while also having their cultural backgrounds to be acknowledged and used in their learning.

The best way method to assess what students know is formative assessments. Instead of having summative assessments at the end of the unit, a teacher can observe a student’s contribution to the discussion in their groups and with the class. A teacher can also use a student’s work made in their collaborative groups or their responses to daily questions that are implemented throughout the class as assessments. Formatives are a more accurate assessment than summative assessments because it takes into consideration of the student’s knowledge development and deters away from the all-or-nothing, right-or-wrong assessments. It also allows the teacher to assess their student’s knowledge of concepts of different units rather than just one unit. Most importantly, formative assessments create an opportunity for students to try again instead of relying on one substantial grade to define what they know.