Promising Practices

            During Promising Practices, I attended workshop IB: Idea to Implementation: Challenges and Opportunities of Building an Outdoor Classroom to Broaden Participation in STEM and workshop IIE: Comedy in the Classroom. 

            Workshop IB focused heavily on creative ways to use the new resource of an outdoor classroom in culturally responsive and relevant ways.  The outdoor classroom was built here at RIC next to the two beehives.  The structure was created to hold the seats, which all contain interesting bee facts on them, and provide a place to teach or engage in experiments.  The classroom does not just have to be used for activities related to the bees; we discussed how weather investigations could be performed there as well.  We talked about how a responsive pedagogy expects academic achievement from all students, maintains the students’ cultural backgrounds, and understands, recognizes, and critiques social inequities, and how the outdoor classroom could be used to achieve these goals.  Part of our discussion included how the outdoor classroom could be used to give students who are used to living in a very urban environment a hands-on experience with things in nature.  This would help to give the children an experience that children from suburban or rural families might take for granted.  We also talked about how the outdoor classroom could be used to raise student motivation, thinking, engagement, and help the students link topics to real world scenarios, whether it be doing a geometrical analysis of the beehives, or thinking up new ways the school could use its honey.

            The second workshop on comedy in the classroom was not really what I expected it to be.  It was geared towards creating a relaxing environment for students in the very early grades.  Everything that we were shown would certainly work and improve a first or second grade classroom, but I do not think it would translate well to a high school class.

            The keynote speaker, Dr. Christopher Emdin, gave a very interesting and passionate speech.  I particularly agreed with him on the need to change our styles of teaching and assessing.  We need to move away from so much direct instruction and start experiment with indirect methods.  His example of the student that knew everything about Newton’s laws, but was simply not used to showing it on a written exam was especially moving.  If a student knows all the information, then it is a crime for them to fail the test on it.  The teacher needs to take the time to help the students learn how to express their knowledge in different ways without the punishment of a bad grade looming over them.  I really liked the overall message of his address.  The classroom should reflect the students’ cultures and interests.  There is no reason for school to feel like a punishment or jail, and everyone should be comfortable enough to freely participate.  One issue that was not talked about was what if my classroom is filled with many students who’s cultures differ wildly from one another’s?  Is there a good strategy to engage all students when all the students participate differently?

            I had a very positive experience at Promising Practices.  I enjoyed the experience of getting to see the solutions that educators have created to combat some of the problems in their classrooms, and it got me to start thinking even more about the ways I would want to run my own classes in the future.

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What makes a good teacher?

The four qualities a teacher needs are creativity, flexibility, insightfulness, and dedication.  There are many other qualities which a good teacher embodies, but these are the four that I wanted to focus on.

It is very important to be a creative teacher.  Children are going to get bored very easily if every class is exactly the same.  The monotony of the class might even cause them to begin to dislike it.  Taking the course material and coming up with different ways to present it is an excellent skill to have.  A geometry teacher, for example, could teach students about translations, rotations, and reflections by actually bringing in shapes and having a lesson that revolves around group work where the students need to move the shapes in real space and trace how the shapes got from one place to another.  This might be extremely effective for some students who are hands-on learners, and will get the whole class involved in the activity instead of just passively listening to someone talk about moving shapes in a Cartesian plane.  If the students have been going from lecture to lecture all day this kind of activity would be very fun to them and they will probably take a lot away from it.

The ability to be flexible is crucial as well.  Planning at home a lesson could seem to the teacher to be the best lesson that the world has ever seen, but then when it is actually implemented in the classroom it might not go as well as expected.  The teacher needs to be willing to change things if they don’t go as planned.  Being flexible around how lessons are taught and presented will only help benefit the students’ learning.  Being able to change things on the fly and having a back up plan is another very important part of this quality. 

A teacher also needs to be very insightful.  When any teacher asks “And now are there any questions?”, he or she is met with silence the majority of the time.  Whether students just don’t want to ask a question, or don’t want to let their friends know they don’t understand something, there is a stigma against asking a question in front of the class.  Knowing this, a teacher needs to be able to pick up on different non-obvious clues from the students to assess their absorption of the material.  When a teacher is done explaining something if he or she can recognize puzzled looks, then he or she might do another example or explain something in different words to help the students who might be lost while avoiding the dreaded “Are there any questions?”.  Insightfulness can carry beyond the educational realm as well.  If a teacher can pick up on a student having a bad day, the teacher can conduct themselves differently to help with that situation.  Even if the student doesn’t want to talk about what is wrong, if a person can realize that someone else is stressed then they can avoid doing anything to worsen things.

Finally a teacher needs dedication.  Teaching is not easy work. There is always more planning to be done, more lessons to be created or re-worked, and more students in need of extra help.  A teacher needs to be willing to put in the time, effort, and energy on a daily basis to deal with all these tasks.  A teacher who isn’t dedicated only hurts the students.  If a teacher helps the first three students with questions perfectly, then gets tired of answering the same questions and begins to give lackluster explanations then every student after the first three suffers.  Being a teacher should be looked at as a commitment.  Teachers should be teachers even if it’s not school hours, looking for new methods of instruction or thinking about ways to help everyone in their class successfully master the lessons.