Guest post by Brandon Brown, AP U.S. History and American History II Teacher, Lake Norman Charter High School
Brandon is in his 11th year of teaching high school Social Studies. He is the 2016 North Carolina Charter Schools Teacher of the Year. This essay was included in the Teacher of the Year finalist process.
Philosophy of Teaching
by Brandon Brown
A
lot of times in life, it is not what one knows, or whom one knows, but instead,
what one believes. This dictum can be applied to teachers. What a teacher
believes about students and what a teacher believes about his/her role can have
tremendous effects in a classroom. Therefore, I have prioritized two basic
beliefs about teaching and learning because I feel they have helped create an
advantageous learning environment for my students. First, a teacher must see
the best in students and second a teacher must embrace their role as a teacher
of thinking not simply content.
The ideal classroom teacher is
one who motivates students. There are many different schools of thought on how
to best motivate students. Many teachers believe that fear and coercion is the
most effective tool to motivate students. However, creating a culture of fear
in a classroom will only provide short-term motivation in students and
ultimately can intimidate and alienate students from the learning process.
Opposed to the “fear and coercion” school is motivating a student through
respect and responsibility.
For an example, if a student
forgets his/her homework, “fear and coercion” teachers would spend class time
berating a student with the hopes that student would be scared into doing
his/her next assignment. However, the teacher has potentially lost that child’s
interest and respect that could pay consequences for the remainder of the year.
In addition, the teacher has wasted possible learning moments, as well as,
created a classroom culture where other students fear making a poor choice or
mistake. Students should not fear failure in the classroom, the classroom is a
place for risk-taking, a place to challenge one’s self.
Instead, the focus should be on
the next homework assignment, while stressing the importance of making good
decisions. By expecting students to make good decisions, the teacher is
respecting the student and encouraging the student to be responsible. Teachers
should treat students as capable individuals, not incompetent kids. We have all
heard “glass half full or half empty” cliché, but it really does matter how a
teacher sees the glass (the students) – it can make all of the difference in
student performance. Those teachers who expect the best effort possible from
their students often receive it; those teachers who see the worst in students
often receive their worst.
Furthermore, with the current
emphasis on standardized testing, many teachers feel that their job is to make
sure their students pass the state mandated test for their content area.
Newspapers print passing rates and in some cases funding and pay can hinge on
results. However, if we as educators only prepare our students for the test
then we are ultimately doing a disservice to the student, hindering not only
the student’s educational growth, but also personal growth. Going
further, I would argue the ultimate purpose of education is not to teach
students “history” or “math” or “French” or specific answers to specific content
questions like “whose assassination set off WWI?” but instead, dating as far
back as Socrates the purpose of my profession at its most basic level is to
teach students how to think. With the ability to think, a student is armed with
a greater and much more useful tool for life than knowing how to solve a
quadratic equation or answer “Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austria-Hungary
Empire.” This is because a student that knows how to think can add to their
current knowledge and understanding of the world; their knowledge is not dead –
it is alive and evolving as they leave the classroom, the schoolhouse and the
academy. Therefore, if their knowledge and understanding of the world is
constantly evolving their options of where they can go or what they can do are
open; students who can think can truly survive in a world that doesn't yet
exist and ultimately if we admit it or not the world our students will live in
does not yet exist.
Embracing the role of thinking
teacher and not just content teacher has changed the way I teach. The
desire to teach thinking drives how I teach because if I am “teaching” in a
traditional sense, then I am the one thinking and students are merely
containers (to borrow a phrase from educational theorist Paolo Frieire) for
information to be deposited in. Or put another way, the best I can hope for
within the context of a traditional stand and deliver model is that students
will end up “information-full” (to borrow from another educational theriort,
Derek Cabrera) but most likely my students will not be truly “knowledge-able.”
So to truly teach thinking, the
teacher has to let go of their traditional role as a deliver of information and
embrace their role as developer of skills. Letting go of their role as
deliverer is scary for many teachers in the high stakes world of pay for
performance and growth scores, where it feels good to be able to say you
covered every little tidbit of information in your class in case it shows up on
the test. However, to embrace thinking skills is not to abandon content,
instead if content knowledge is presented in the right way – in the context of
a thinking skills it can be chance for students to develop their thinking
skills and construct their own knowledge. The French historian Etienne Gilson
once said that “History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the
consequences of thought.” This quote informs my instruction; I do not just
teach content in my classroom, I teach historical thinking skills like
causation, synthesis, interpretation, and contextualization. I try to use the
past with my students as a conduit to model, practice and hone these thinking
skills and I feel they are better for it.
Thanks for viewing,
The opinions shared in this blog belong to Craig Smith (or guest blogger) and do not represent the school or district in which he works.
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