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Quotes of the day:
"The best teachers are those who show you where to look but don't tell you what to see." -Alexandra K. Trefor
"Never Stop learning, because life never stops teaching." - Unknown

Reflective Writing: How Does One Teach? (For Dummies) 

What is one career that I would never pursue in my life? If you were to ask me this question a couple of years ago, the first thing that would come to my mind would be a teacher. Today, I would probably say a basketball player (ew! sports). But, what made me change my mind?  Why is it that two years ago I would have rather been a basketball player than a teacher, even though I suck at basketball and would have p[robably been broke and/ or unemployed?  Over the years, I've come to realize that a good teaching job does not only depend on how good the teacher is,  but also how good the pupils are towards the teacher. I have come to realize from taking AP and IB classes full of nerdy students eager to learn, that teachers learn as much from the students and the students do from the teachers. It is a teacher's job to open up the minds of his/her students, as well as open up their own minds to brand new possibilities on how the world works and how things could be different. From getting a first-hand experience at teaching, I learned the following three simple things about teaching and how it impacts my learning: 

1. Teaching (and therefore student learning) depends as much on the student as it does the teacher

My group and I worked really hard on preparing an interesting, engaging lesson on how emotion impacts learning. It was packed with videos and discussion questions and even a really neat picture activity. However, none of the lessons would have been interesting to the TOK class if we had not found a good way to make sure the students were participating and paying attention to what we were talking about.

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There is a poster that many of my teachers have posted in their classrooms. It says: "The teacher opens the door, but you must choose to enter it." It is true that the responsibility of paying attention and participating in class falls directly on the student. However, I learned from teaching that it is also the responsibility of the teacher to create ways for students to keep engaged and want to participate in the lesson, even of the students are shy or don't feel too comfortable speaking in class.


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The way we did this was through origami, yes, origami (I have a weird obsession with it). We made these origami paper birds, each of them was a different color. Each student chose their own origami bird at the beginning of class, but what they didn't know was that by choosing a paper bird, they also chose to answer a random discussion question that was assigned to the bird's color. For example, the kid that chose the black paper bird had to answer the last question, which said: "what are some pros and cons of learning with emotion?" This pushed a few students that were shy and quiet to participate in the lesson. It also made them pay attention to what our group was talking about, as they didn't know when their question was going to come up for discussion.

I realized from doing this that when more students participate, there is a more diverse set of opinions that allow for students to learn from each other and have new ideas. This is very good because often times, teachers seem to only be teaching to a set group of students that participate, and the rest of students are simply there, and their ideas aren't shared to everyone else.

2. You learn more when you teach 

Because of the fact that I had to figure out how to explain specific things to many different kinds of learners, I had to really understand what I was talking about and what I was trying to get across. I also had to understand which information was the most important in order to organize my time teaching. In addition, student participation and personal experiences gave me new ideas as to how emotion impacts learning. All of the students that were in my group understand more about emotion than the students that were not in my group, just like students in other groups know about the topics they taught to the class more than we do.

3. Teaching is not easy


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Finally, I saw first-hand something that I had already learned, and that is, teaching is just not easy. Not only do you have to worry about all the students understanding the material, but you also have to worry about them being engaged and wanting to learn more. I learned with emotion that you retain the information that you seem to be happier with, or that you find more engaging, but students have a very short attention span, and often times you find yourself depending on the few students that pay attention and participate to keep the class interesting. Also, it is hard to explain complex topics in a fun and entertaining way. For example, it was kind of hard for some students to grasp some of the ideas on how the brain worked, and no matter how much we tried to explain, some of them just did not seem very interested on the hippocampus or the hypothalamus. I wish we would have found a way to explain that better or make it more engaging, but at least we got the students to understand the main idea right?

Sometimes when you teach you have to make a sacrifice as to what information the student retains. Not every student learns the same, and not every student will understand the same material with the same amount of effort. However, what makes a good teacher is the ability to make the student want to learn more, and make the student understand most of the material and make educated inferences from both what they learn, what they already know, and what their peers know. I would honestly love to do this activity again, as I learned a lot from it. I learned to be open-minded and to look at my class as a whole, with each individual having a unique mind that had something special to contribute.




Comments

  1. Great teaching from this group. Excellent reflection. You are right about open-mindedness. Sometimes I can do it. Right now, I am still in this mental state where I feel like I'm in opening-minds mode but that MY mind is too closed. Like I am still trying too hard to CONTROL the direction of the conversation.

    It's a fine balance, because you can't just let the conversation go "wherever" (because that's bad teaching), but if you start out knowing what answers the kids will come to, then there's no real, authentic discovery for either you or the students. That's the reason that I always liked science but hated lab days. Labs were boring because whatever piddling little experiment we were doing had already been done a billion times and a) either I already knew what was suppoed to be the answer or b) even if I didn't know, I knew the teacher knew and I couldn't help feeling like she ought to just tell us and get on with it. Theoretical sciences are more fun: no lab work!

    It's bad for me, because I am in this sort of funk: my mind is clouded by certitude, but I know the amazing potential of that destabilizing uncertainty that happens just before learning. Some of that uncertainty has to be in me too, as the teacher.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I had to come back because I forgot to tell you how much I love-love-loved the origami question game. What a great way to make quiet kids speak up!

    Don't forget to title your blogs.

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