General Reflections on Education
What are we doing here? The following sets of questions can help you articulate your philosophy of education. When you are done, you can save your responses to the notepad in your backpack, e-mail them, print them, or share your thoughts with other teachers.
- What is education and who is it for?
- Who am I teaching?
- What should we be teaching?
- Why teach?
- Who teaches?
The following sets of questions can help you think about the atmosphere and design of your classroom.
- How do I want students to interact in my classroom?
- In what ways is it important for students to interact with the community in which they live?
- What resources should be available to my students?
- How can I use the wall space in my classroom to further active learning?
The following sets of questions can help you think about your work this week and this year ... What have you learned this week? What have you taught this week? How are you doing in your work? The questions posed in this section are designed to provide you with some space in which you can consider your own professional development.
- What was the most important thing I tried to teach my students this week?
- What is/are the most important thing(s) my students will learn from me this year?
- What did I learn from my students this week?
- What was I thinking?
Some reflections:
I teach because I want to make a difference in students' lives - not just with curriculum, but by inspiring them. I am teaching a variety of students, from different backgrounds and of different levels. I want students to feel comfortable and excited coming to class everyday (good luck with that!).
1 comment:
Thanks for the comment on my blog. I just put up a new slideshow on creativity that may get you thinking about some ideas for math.
I teach fifth grade math so I can't offer too much help for creative ideas. We do get into patterns and functions though and this year I played an ongoing game with them that I called "Epidemic". Every few days over a couple weeks I would hang a note card over a student's neck and tell them that they had been infected. The number of students who had been infected would double each time. They eventually had to graph the pattern and describe the rate of change, etc.
I didn't tell them what was going on until the very end--I kept them guessing the whole time. It was a perfect example of von Oech's "looking for the second right answer".
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