Written May 30, 2011

 

Portfolio Writing:

Reflection on My Developing Philosophy

 

Write a paper on in which you reflect on how your view and philosophy of education have developed during the program.

 

 

            Informed by a vigorous student-teaching experience at West High School and the courses I have taken through UAS, my views on the purpose of education and proper methods of conducting it have greatly evolved over the course of the MAT program. As my written philosophies have become more cohesive, streamlined and succinct, some of the beliefs I held at the start of the program have strengthened and others have waned.

 

            I believe more than ever in the importance of classroom management, and now consider creating a positive classroom climate and classroom culture to be the primary ingredient. To paraphrase the sage advice of one of my informal mentors at West: “Forget about the content; teaching is 70% relationships, and 30% subject matter. Build the relationships and the learning will come.”

 

As I recognized in each of my philosophies, being attentive to student differences is the critical ingredient toward creating a positive classroom climate. The more I learned about each of my students, the better-managed my classroom became. While it is important to pay attention to the oft-quoted demographic variables for the purpose of creating accommodations and modifications, such as students’ cultural and language backgrounds, past test scores, and past school performance, students are most starkly differentiated by their experiences and personalities, factors that are not captured by those statistics. As the year went on, I assigned work which gave students more opportunities to share with me their personal interests, family lives, dreams and aspirations, likes and dislikes about themselves and others, and found that the more I learned and responded to these details, the better behaved my class became. Whether it came from unconscious adjustments I was making, the fact that students felt more comfortable having expressed themselves to me, or any number of other possible explanations doesn’t matter. What matters is that it works! I have learned that it is very important to allow students to tell the teacher directly what makes them who they are, and differentiate from there. Many of my most effective accommodations and modifications resulted from my informal conversations with students rather than my examinations of test scores or IEPs.

 

Though I recognized at the start of the year that my individual students would vary quite a bit, I thought that classes with the same label might bear some overall similarity to one another. However, I very quickly that classroom cultures vary drastically at West High School, from class period to class period, and year to year. My English 9 class was talkative, energetic, and social with one another, with more than a couple smart students who failed because they did absolutely no work (these students failed their classes across the board). By contrast, my mentor teachers’ English 9 class was almost mute, with lower test scores in general, but no failing students. Similarly, my other mentor teacher, who has been teaching Honors English 10 for six years, found her honors students this year to be far-and-away some of the least focused honors students she has ever had. Many of her “tried and true” assignments, such as creating a satirical podcast for Huck Finn, were not completed to the normal effort level, or indeed, completed at all. Both of us struggled consistently and often failed to get the thirty-five students in this class to stop socializing and focus during direct instruction.

 

As a result of these experiences, I have come to believe that units and lessons should be catered and modified to fit specific classes. Though my final philosophy of education states that a progressive teaching model can be beneficial, I strongly believe that such a model can actually lead to worse educational outcomes for certain groups of students. My first hour English 10 class was “a class of misfits”, as my mentor teacher put it, with students so culturally, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse as to almost not know how to talk to each other. Many of them were relatively recent immigrants with little or no experience with cooperative work, and while some strongly identified with school achievement, others were almost completely indifferent. The most prototypically progressive projects that I assigned this year also created the largest range in success rates, with students who normally struggle doing significantly worse, often not completing the projects at all, and students who normally excel doing just as well. Projects that involved group work and/or took several days to complete were the most problematic, due variously to poor attendance and an inability on the part of the students to balance socializing and work.

 

Though I still seek to create experiential lessons with real-life implications, I now do my best to either make them individualized projects or to create specialized individual roles for students within their groups. I also try to limit my progressive lessons to either one-day projects, or have students work from an internet platform so that they can access and work on the project at home. Students with poor or inconsistent attendance will still have trouble making up missed assignments under this model, which can be a headache for all involved (this was a very common problem in my first hour, with a 25% absence rate during 4th quarter). However, I believe the benefit of project-based, experiential learning to the students who are present outweighs the cost to those who would have missed class regardless of what we were doing. To sum it up, though progressive learning strategies can be an excellent way to learn, what works for one class may not work for another; with certain classes and groups progressive learning strategies must be used in a very limited fashion to ensure student success.

 

            Since the start of the year, I have started to place less emphasis on parent-teacher communication in my personal philosophy. Though I believe that improved parent-teacher communication and parent-school involvement is an integral component of improving public high schools, I have found my original thought of communicating with all parents consistently (or even having communication with all parents of struggling students) to be naively idealistic. Though I regularly communicate concerns via telephone and email and respond to parent emails within the hour, it is often with some difficulty that I communicate. Many parents in the community in which I work are not invested in school, or had a poor relationship with school as a student, and feel inconvenienced or even accosted when contacted by a teacher. Others are impossible to reach, exert little control over their child, or are poorly informed of their kids’ whereabouts or study habits in the first place. For parents of the students of greatest concern, I often receive no response to my calls or emails. I would love to be a part of a larger school-wide or community-wide effort to improve parent-teacher-school communication and help educate parents on how they can be involved in their child’s education and help their child to succeed in school. However, this is almost impossible to achieve on a one-classroom level given the culture of the school.

 

For next year, I plan on creating a protocol for more consistently contacting parents. On their first day of class, each student will fill out a notecard for me with parent contact information so that I have parents’ real contact information, as the school’s records are often outdated. Within the first month, I will try to contact three to five parents per day to test the contact information out, introducing myself and explaining how they can check their students’ grades and how I can be contacted. After that, even if a parent is not involved, and never responds to later messages, I will at least have covered the bases from my end.

 

After a year on the front lines of teaching, I feel more strongly that students must take responsibility for their own learning. While I provide opportunities, new information, resources, support, and feedback, it is a student’s job to follow my instructions and create their own learning. A students’ ability to take responsibility for their learning is actually inhibited by the more punitive aspects of school, which include punitive grading when it comes to class work and punishments when it comes to classroom behavior.

 

There is a difference between “grading” and “assessment”; while the former lets a student know, regardless of their effort or ability, how well they have done on some arbitrary A-F scale, the latter informs the student of whether or not they have properly demonstrated their learning, how they excelled, and how they can improve. Grading is often punitive, reflecting some level of judgment (you get 100% except if you make mistakes), and ends by labeling a students’ performance, and, simultaneously, the students themselves, with a “grade”. By contrast, assessment takes into account how a person is doing relative to a standard, and, with the accompanying feedback, allows students to take personal responsibility for improving specific areas of their learning. While both grading and assessment are necessary, it is important for teachers to remember that assessment is what truly helps students to learn. With this belief, it is the teacher’s responsibility to assess and grade assignments in a timely manner so that students have the tools and time to take steps toward improvement.

 

            Just as we must empower students to take personal responsibility for their skill improvement, students must also take personal responsibility for their classroom behavior. Unfortunately, the current “punishments” for bad behavior do not help students in this regard. “Punishments”, such as detention, assign the same unpleasant task of “doing nothing” to students, regardless of their offense. When a student is done “accepting” the punishment, they can walk away, and ask, with all sincerity, “what do you want from me now? I served the time.” Consequences, on the other hand, follow more causally from the students’ actions. Students who talk too much may not be allowed to sit with friends. Students who use all their bathroom passes in the first week of the quarter will have to “hold it” after that. Consequences encourage students to take personal responsibility for improvement, and reinforce the link between bad decisions and bad outcomes that students will encounter time and time again in the world outside of school.

 

I became an educator because I want to be a life-long learner, and I believe strongly that teaching is the best profession from which to do so. I am also a perfectionist, and, luckily (or perhaps unluckily) for me, there are always ways for a teacher to improve their craft. My earnest efforts to further developing my philosophy, I hope, will take me far. Looking forward to next year, I am excited for my philosophy to be tested, and to evolve.