Teaching is something that I’ve always known I wanted to do. I have always been inspired by my teachers and I can’t wait to be a successful teacher. The one thing that I think will help me the most in being a successful teacher is having an understanding of Piaget’s concept of constructivism. In Piaget’s constructivist theory he claimed that students learn best when the new information they are presented with can build off of some of their prior life experiences. This concept of scaffolding material is really important to me because I feel that students learn best when the instruction is based and built upon prior knowledge that they already have learned. This method of scaffolding a class can help students from being lost by creating a more natural flow through the information presented through instructional activities and lectures. Additionally, I feel that constructivism is at the heart of the “5E Model” in that students are given a chance to experience the content firsthand before looking more in-depth at the details of that math or science content.
Another thing that I personally feel is very important to the teaching process is the culture of the classroom. In my eyes the most effective classroom culture is one where everyone feels safe to express their own unique ideas and questions. Additionally, an effective classroom culture should be one where the student feels valued as an intellectual, no matter what their educational background is. Creating this classroom culture is one of the most important things that a teacher does early in the semester or year. I personally feel that this is very important because in high school I was really close to some, but not all, of my teachers. After learning about Vygotsky’s ideas of culture, I look back on my years in high school and realize that I learned so much more in the classes where I felt comfortable around the teacher and my peers. The only place I’ve found this close-knit community feeling at UT has been with the UTeachProgram and I’m so thankful for that.
Another aspect of teaching that can’t be forgotten are our concepts of assessment. With the grade-focused society we currently live in teachers are forced to assign letter or numerical grades to almost everything that students do. In my opinion this practice ruins students’ natural curiosity. This forced token economy also gets in the way of allowing teachers to learn more about what their students truly understand as opposed to what they have simply memorized. I believe that a majority of teachers’ grades should come from formative assessment rather than summative assessment. On the rare occasions that I use summative assessment, I will be careful to create the exams to best gain an understanding of the students deeper conceptual understanding rather than just the surface level facts.
As a member of the UTeach Maker program, I feel that this trend away from summative assessment and towards formative assessment is crucial to the learning and making process. Through the use of projects and longer classroom group activities teachers can learn so much more about the students understanding than just through a simple multiple-choice test. Multiple-choice test takes most of the ownership of knowledge out of the students’ hands and puts it into the hands of the teachers. This happens because usually feedback isn’t given on multiple-choice tests so the student doesn’t gain an understanding of what concepts they truly understand and where they are still personally struggling. This ownership is important to making students feel comfortable in a course. This idea of not giving feedback so that the students can learn at the same time as the teacher disagrees with Freire’s ideas of having the teacher and students being “equals” in order for both parties to take ownership of their learning.