I am a teacher because I have a passion to connect with people. I love being able to talk and discuss things, even trivial things, like sports and entertainment. To be a teacher is like being a mentor, a friend, a disciplinarian, a creator, and a conversationalist, all in one. Being able to go home and know you had some good conversations and you learned something new about a topic or a person is one of the best feelings you could ask for. Being there for people, even if it was just to talk about the TV show you both watch, is something that helps bring people together, and helps teach us all to be better everyday. Being able to think on your feet and change a lesson to help students understand is a great thing to be able to see when students begin to understand a concept. As a teacher my goal and plan is to help students become lifelong learners. I want students to be able to become historians and create an interest in learning and a desire to be their best. I want students to want to learn and be creative in doing so. I always hope that someday I will have a student come back 10 years later and tell me that they became a better student because of what we did in my class.
I like to use project based learning and a flipped model of lecture to help create an interest the students. Students tend to learn better when they get to be active and participate with hands on activities. It is always easier to learn a game when you are playing compared to trying to listen to someone explain the rules. My teaching philosophy is the same, I feel that students work better when he/she get to participate in the subject over just hearing someone talk about it. I also use a flipped model of teaching where students spend their time at home learning the material through video lectures and readings. The time in class is spent completing the work and participating in projects. If a student is struggling at home with a lecture, he/she can watch it again and again to find what he/she is missing. If a student is struggling at home with a project they can only ask their parents, and many times the parents are not fully sure of what the assignment is trying to accomplish. That’s why it’s better to have the teacher answering the project questions in class for the student and the parent helping the student learn the material at home.
Many of my assignments are projects that involve the student becoming a historian or part of history. We will debate and discuss the differences in opinions for the creation of the Constitution or the creation of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. In class we spend a lot of time writing journals from the time periods perspective or creating artifacts from the area we are researching. We will spend time creating a Facebook page for a President, or creating a meme to help us explain the causes of the American Civil War. Most projects and activities have the students working on becoming a part of that time, to become empathetic of the people living during that time and to think about how he/she would react to similar situations.
I like to assess the students through mostly formative assessment. This is usually ungraded feedback to the student that helps them understand what they are doing right or wrong before they are given a grade. This way the student has the opportunity to rethink and reevaluate their understanding of a topic before they get a grade. This tends to help students not just succeed grade wise but actually understand and learn a topic.
Overall, teaching matters to me because it is a true opportunity to make a difference. Even though many days you don’t feel as if you are, the students don’t see it, or you do not recognize the difference being made. There is always an opportunity to make a change in not just the students you see but also my colleagues and myself. Everyday is a day to learn something new and to take advantage of being able to connect with people. Teaching is the one place that everyone has experience, since we have all been a student. I get the chance to impact lives using history.