My Teaching Career - Research Paper Example

My Teaching Career I believe a successful teacher is an individual that shares experiences and the knowledge they possess in such a way as to leave the student with a long-term and dramatic confidence of having benefited from the lessons. Even as a teacher I am still learning each and every day, life is one long learning process. (Print, 2006, 215) Therefore, there is a need to understand how as an individual or collectively we learn. Obviously these are just guidelines on preferred styles. I prefer to teach in the way in which I preferred as a learner to be taught. A cognitive approach can also be adopted during the lessons. This is allowing each member of the group to evaluate each others performance. This would then give each student a greater understanding of where they went wrong and why if needed. The other school of thought promoted by leading psychologists such as John Dewey (1859-1952), Jerome Bruner (b.1916) and Jean Piaget (1896-1980) all follow the cognitive ethic. John Dewey maintains that "Knowledge comes out only from situations where learners have to portray them out of significant experiences." (Curzon, 2005, 35) Whereas Jerome Bruner states that "Education is a social development, in which learners constitute new concepts based on existing information. The learner selects information, makes hypotheses and takes decisions with intend of integrating latest experiences into his present mental constructs." (Reece, 2004, 58) According to Jean Piaget "The foundation of learning is finding: 'to recognize is to learn, or rebuild by rediscovery, and such conditions must be complied with if in the prospect individuals are to be formed who are competent of creation and creativeness and not simple replication." (Papadakis, 2005, 120) My own interpretation of this theory is that Cognetivism or Constructivism is the building of a student's knowledge in small observable blocks, each one built on top of his or her own previous knowledge. Each segment of the knowledge must be presented to the student in such a way that they can follow the logical progression from one stage to another, using previously learned skills. Cognetivism is used the most within my teaching environment in that the overall style of instruction lends itself towards this idea of small achievable steps, building on already learned and digested information. I take the student through the familiarisation lesson on the equipment and show them the equipment in full working condition. The student has the opportunity to investigate and construct his or her own concept of the equipment. I then fault the equipment and allow the student to find the fault, hopefully using logical steps within the latticework of understanding that they have to build themselves. My style of teaching has changed considerably in the past year. This can be attributed in some way to my involvement with the Cert Ed course and the benefits this has brought due to the diversity in teaching backgrounds of the attending students. The other reason could be, simply, that I have found my own feet as an instructor and allowed my wide and varied life experience to define my teaching style. In doing so I realised that the Humanistic approach was being used more and more in my day to day teaching. I tend to nurture and guide as opposed to shout and direct, a totally new concept within my schooling. My aim is to produce a student that is mentally proficient and cognitively aware of the basics of problem solving in the aircraft environment. As you have noticed on the 2008 teaching observations the hangar is an extremely fluid and dangerous working area and the students have to be mentally tuned to these dangers otherwise they place themselves and others in danger. Putting a student in this environment that is not ready is a foolhardy undertaking. There is difference between knowing something and understanding. (Schwenk, 2004, 50) For example, many people know what the Big Bang Theory is. They know that it is supposedly the beginning of our solar system. However, there are few people that can say that they truly understand the theory. To be able to make a child understand something is an amazing task. When you see something occur, it makes it so much easier to understand. To read an article about a horrible car crash is one thing. But to be at the scene of the accident is another story all together. The crash will have a major impact on witnesses because they were there and they saw how it happened. The same goes for education. Learning will have a deeper impact on students if they experience it first hand. Children are changing very much, very fast and in order to accommodate for these changes, teaching methods need to have some variety put into them. I do not believe that hands-on activities are the best route to go in every situation. For instance, if one were trying to tell about the Holocaust, it would seem disrespectful to have the students reenact a scene, as Sewall argues is usually the case. This sort of teaching should be done with sensitivity and respect so that the children do not receive a false conception of what the Holocaust was like. Also keep in mind that children's attention spans are getting smaller and smaller with every passing year and so many times an activity is going to be disadvantageous to the students. Kids need to be able to sit and listen for an extended period of time if their attention span is going to increase. Activity-based learning should not be a copout that teachers use in order to adjust to the short attention span of children. However, if a half hour lecture is given to a class and then an hour long activity follows it, the children will not react with such outbursts that show evidence of disinterest. Children get more out of school than just the basic book knowledge. It is a place where kids go in order to receive all sorts of knowledge. Skills are taught to the children by teachers and peers that can be used in the real world; how to interact with peers, increase attention span, respect for others, expand imagination and so on. The mind is something that needs to grow just as much as the human body needs to. The brain is an amazing tool that with the proper adjustments can be used to accomplish almost anything. Keeping this in mind, it would make sense to give students a problem and let them attempt to figure it out on their own before just handing them the answer. Working together is something they are going to have to do for the rest of their lives and so doing activities that require group thinking would make sense. The function of a teacher in the teaching process has changed a lot. The teacher-mentor, the teacher director cannot give the student choice and cannot provide freedom in teaching. Such negative images disappeared in the past. They were replaced by a teacher - observer, a teacher -facilitator, a teacher - tolerant one, and a teacher - supervisor. (White, 2005, 522) The teacher is really an organizer of modern courses. The ideal group consists of 10-15 students. In a group students can communicate with each other much better. The expansion of technology has brought about a lot of advantages to the field of teaching and learning including providing a wide range of materials, innovating the subject’s instruction and resulting in the appearance of e-learning. Therefore, if these innovations are made full use of, they will not only enable teachers to teach better but also encourage students to learn more effectively. The Internet, with a huge number of websites it provides, has become an essential resource for English study. Because the majority of these websites are in English, just by surfing them, students of the language can greatly build up their vocabularies. (Dewey, 2002, 61) Also, there are many websites that have been established just for the promotion of English, to which teachers can access to download materials for their own lectures. Meanwhile, students can also use these websites for self-studying purposes. Secondly, technological advances have also led to an innovation in the method of teaching and learning. This can be easily seen through a simple comparison between teaching in the past and that at present. Previously, teaching was carried out with the aid of only a blackboard, some pieces of chalk, and books. With such limitations, teaching normally meant the teachers imparted the knowledge from the books to their students by writing down some special structures or new words on the blackboard. The students would then take notes of these structures and then learn them by rote afterwards. Nowadays, the method of teaching and learning has been modernized with such aids as overheads, computers and projectors. Teachers no longer merely read out loud for the students to take notes. Instead, they can make their lectures more vivid and memorable by using slide shows. For example, in a graphic descriptive lesson, with slides of different types of graphs, it is only necessary to include some introductory sentences to be useful to students. Students can also take advantage of these aids to give presentations more effectively. Overall, thanks to technological innovations, teaching and learning English is now more pleasant and more effectual. I have always found it hard for a health teacher to try and educate students about the pros and cons of what they do to and put in their body when that teacher publicly and visibly disregards what they do to themselves (smoke, drink, etc). Every teacher that proves to be highly effective in teaching does not need to have same characteristics. (Mintzberg, 2008, 247) If an individual think about their favorite teachers, all such teachers did not possess same teaching style or traits. No each teacher has their own special identity with their students due to many different factors. So what makes an effective teacher is something that will be explained differently from student to student. However, there are some characteristics I believe that help educators be an effective teacher. Most of these ideas come from my experiences with teachers, from readings, and my personal experience trying to teach others. To begin with a teacher, who is well educated, understands the material they are teaching, and can effectively transfer the lesson to the students will always be an effective educator. It is good for all teachers to fit into this broad statement, but it doesn't really get into the meat of the subject. In order to really be an effective teacher there are many avenues in which they can travel. It really comes down to what the teacher believes will be most effective and how well that style of teaching goes with their character/beliefs. These avenues all have different outcomes when taught by certain teachers. We must also consider the demographic of the students the educator is teaching. Since we are just discussing what characteristics make an effect teacher we really don't have to try and explain all the different avenues and the ways to reach a desired ending. We simply need to state some of these characteristics in order for each educator to try and find the right balance between academic/learning value and making the material exciting. Once the educator has the student's attention and can show them that learning can be fun they will need to make sure that the material is covered and comprehended. Educators with a formal set of rules that can keep the students behaved without totally restricting them as long as the teacher makes sure this works well. (Walkin, 2006, 72) Going along with this is how the educator decides to execute their punishments. This has a great effect on the student and the class. An effective teacher will not want to embarrass the student in front of the class, but they want the class to know that the rules have been broken and that means the person has to face the consequences for their actions. Coming from the opposite end a teacher also needs to make sure and give plenty of positive reinforcement to all their students (Especially those who seem to be having a harder time for whatever reason). Educators who show appreciation and do not discriminate other cultures show students that ethnic and cultural diversity is interesting and fun. Effective teachers try their best to relate the course material to their student's life experiences for optimal participation and learning. For instance when I was in sixth grade my teacher taught us pigskin geography. It integrated football with learning geography, math, and spelling. This sort of idea is what helps kids want to learn using new ways to teach to break the repetitiveness of the everyday thing. These new ideas might be using computers (technology new and old), or getting out of the classroom (field trips), or just letting someone else come and talk to them once in awhile (dad/mom day, Junior Achievement, DARE, the list goes on). Educators who have a positive attitude and continually encourage their students to not only try, but to try their hardest will most likely rub their optimistic outlook off onto their students. References Curzon, L.B. (2005) Teaching in Further Education. 5th Edition, Great Britain: Redwood Books. Pg 30-37 Dewey, J. (2002) Democracy and Education. 2nd Edition, New York USA: Free Press. Pg 57-62 Mintzberg, H., Raisinghani, D. & Theoret, A. (2008): The structure of unstructured decision making, Administrative Science Quarterly, pp. 246-75 Papadakis, V. M., Lioukas, S. & Chambers, D. (2005): Strategic decision-making processes: the role of management and context, Strategic Management Journal, pp. 115-147 Print, M. (2006) Curriculum Development and Design, Great Britain: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd. Pg 200-235 Reece, I. (2004) Teaching Training and Learning. 4th Edition, Great Britain: Business Education Publishing. Pg 58 Schwenk, C. (2004): The cognitive perspective on strategic decision making, Journal of Management Studies, pp. 41-55 Walkin, L. (2006) Teaching and learning in further and adult education. 2nd Revised Edition, Great Britain: Stanley Thorne's Publishing. Pg72. Warren, K. (2007): Exploring competitive future using cognitive mapping, Long Range Planning, pp. 10-21. White, H. C. (2005): Where do markets come from? American Journal of Sociology, pp. 517-47. Read More