|
Components of Education
Curriculum
My aim as an educator is to keep abreast of any and all of the latest curriculum and adopt it to fit my students' needs. I feel it is not enough to simply buy a set of books and expect the students to create meaning as they plod through texts. I've noticed that I'm happiest when I have catered the curriculum to mine and the students' needs. It is more work creating the curricula, but the rewards justify the effort!
I will strive to create and employ curriculum that is:
- Geared to students' developmental needs
- Connected to their lives
- Supportive of individual learning styles and strengths
- Interdisciplinary in approach
- Organized around projects, themes, and challenging questions
- Structured around active engagement with materials and ideas
- Designed to ensure the systematic and sequential acquisition of skills
I will further use curriculum which:
- Nurtures creativity, intellectual pursuit, and a love of learning
- Creates a balance between process and product
- Develops critical thinking
- Spirals themes, concepts, and skills throughout the grades
- Fosters both individual and cooperative learning
Instructional Strategies
I believe firmly in the concept of individualized instruction. That is my main tenet in terms of strategies. Digging deeper, I also feel it extremely useful to pay close attention to what research is telling educators about how kids learn. Staying open to new strategies will guarantee that my students are given every opportunity to succeed.
From UCDS' Philosophy Statement:
"Given the opportunity to construct their own understanding, children will learn differently. Each child has unique talents, ways of thinking and levels of understanding. We anticipate that children will learn at different rates and expect that children of the same chronological age will be at different places in their social, emotional, and physical development.
Each child brings to the classroom a set of prior learning experiences and values from their family and community. We believe that all of these differences are important to my understanding of who a child is and how he/she makes sense of the world. We see our job as teacher as not to create a single perfect curriculum or a spectacular lesson, but rather to observe individual children carefully to create instructional strategies based on what a child needs."
I will try to focus on the development level of each individual child and assess them to discover which strategy will be most effective. Robert Marzano's book Classroom Insructions that Works has been an extremely valuable resource in terms of discovering the most recent research based strategies.
Assessment
The job of the educator first and foremost is that of observer. In order to correctly identify the needs of each student teachers must be keen observers. The most effective assessments will be performed by the child. At the heart of assessment is reflection; students that learn to assess their own work will be successful students long after they leave my classroom. Therefore assessment will always aim to be for learning and not of learning.
In assessing students I will always make it clear that the aim is for them to improve their skills, and not for me simply to grade them. Students excel when they know what the teacher is looking for and when the expectations are clearly delineated. As it were, give a child a grade and he's aware for a day, teach a child to assess and...
Classroom Management
The classroom must be a community! Children will not learn if they do not feel safe and invested in their classrooms. My classroom will be based (as highlighted earlier) on responsibility, collaboration, and diversity. Each child should receive what they need to succeed, and to maintain a healthy community all children must strive to empathize with one another. A classroom that is a safe place emotionally, physically, and intellectually is a successful classroom.
UCDS' piece on collaboration:
"Collaboration is a vehicle for the civic responsibility we want our students to develop. To participate effectively in a democratic community, children need to learn to engage in dialogue. We think it is vital for children to learn to explain their own thinking, to consider another point of view, to build on someone else's idea, and to reconsider their own thinking based on feedback from others.
Teachers expect children to collaborate to solve problems, to plan activities, and to work together on whole class projects. Children are also expected to consult classmates whenever they need feedback or another idea for approaching a problem. In this way, children are exposed to multiple strategies for solving a problem and become more flexible in their thinking. Children learn to assume leadership at the same time that they assume responsibility for the needs of others in the group."
This excerpt focuses heavily on academic collaboration, but it is equally true in terms of classroom management. Students must feel part of a community and must be held accountable, by the teacher and the community as a whole, to the standards created by both.
My classroom management style is heavily focused on allowing the children to have a voice as to the decisions that directly effect them. Students will understand that experience and wisdom will allow the teacher to have the final say as to what happens in the classroom, but the goal is to for the students to feel ownership over their classroom.
For an intensive look at my philosophies please see University Child Development School's website, as well as Ruth Charney's wonderful book Teaching Children to Care; Classroom Management for Ethical and Academic Growth.
More...
The amazing teachers at UCDS have said it better than I probably ever will, so here's a link to their philosphy and mission statement.
|