Being a teacher is one of the most important careers there is because you are shaping the minds of students who will contribute to society in the future. As a teacher, it is important to have a philosophy, ideas, and goals in your classroom at the beginning to set the stage for the years of teaching to come.
As a teacher, I want to see the best outcomes possible for my students. Part of getting to those outcomes is adjusting to how the students learn best. With having the different learning styles of audio, visual, and kinesthetic, it is important to address all of them throughout lessons in order to optimize the learning outcomes. To me, learning is an advancement of knowledge and how to use the knowledge. In a learning environment, the students are open to new ideas and exposed to a new world of concepts that are being taught one at a time all while building on one another.
To me, teaching is expressing new concepts and ideas to the students to advance their learning opportunities and knowledge. The best way for me to accomplish this in a math classroom would to be to use teamwork to bring the realizations of concepts to life. According to Kagan, using the structures and teamwork can help “open a world of new and exciting teaching and learning possibilities”. In a math classroom, one of the best structures possible is group work in order to discover how certain equations, formulas, and concepts work and then put them to practice in examples and homework problems.
I plan to have several small goals for my students such as turning in their homework and doing well on their test. However, the biggest goal of all will be to get them to enjoy learning in my class. I recently got the experience of doing a math escape room and have a booklet for it. By using this type of game, the students will enjoy putting to practice a new concept through the use of competition. By using the competition in a cooperative classroom style, Kagan explains how “there are always more cooperative class goals and within team cooperation.” This will enable the students to build social skills while having fun in a competition.
One of the biggest things with being a teacher is being an influence on the students. Being a person in which the students know they can go to whenever they need any help. I strive to be the teacher that the students will not be afraid to come to if they are struggling in my class. To implement this, I want to have opportunities to get to know the students while they work on either group work or homework. According to Whitaker, it is important to “focus on engagement” in the classroom. This includes being engaged with the students and letting them know that you are there to help them. This also means keeping the students engaged in class. I plan to keep them engaged by not giving them a second to get bored. I will have class split up into small increments to change what we are doing.
As a teacher, it is important to set goals for myself. My main goal will be to constantly reflect back to each grading period and each year to see what techniques have worked and what techniques have not worked. As well as reflect back to how I handled certain situations and how I can improve on them. According to Chism, this is plan is showing how I have grown as a teacher. It is important to recognize as a teacher how you have grown as a teacher and how you can grow more to improve your classroom.