Educational Beliefs & Practices Reflection

Teaching is important to me because it is the only career that I can see myself enjoying for the rest of my life. It is eminently fulfilling to work with a classroom full of students and be focused only on helping them understand a concept that will help them be better readers, or better writers, or better thinkers. I want to help my students grow and be better people, and I think that the best way to do that is through a thoughtful and varied education that exposes my students to many diverse cultures and ideas. I believe that this is the core of why education is important to a person and to society in general. If all an education was for was to be a good cog, then that is all that we would teach students, but it is for so much more than that. A proper liberal arts education exposes a student to ideas and cultures and art that they would have never experienced otherwise. This exposure broadens a student’s worldview and allows them to think about more than what is immediately in front of them. And this, in turn, leads to students who are more creative, are critical thinkers, and who are able to see the world through multiple lenses. I am inspired to be a teacher because I want to effect this change in the lives of my students. I want them to have fulfilling and enriching lives where they can appreciate the diverse world around them, and I want to be the inspiration they remember in leading them to that place.

I believe that students learn best when they are engaged and interested in what they are learning. As such, I believe that it is my responsibility as a teacher to make sure that the lessons that I am constructing for my students grab their attention and keep it through entertaining, engaging, and informative instruction. I believe that effective teaching is teaching that results in students wanting to continue learning because they find the journey fascinating. This means letting the student have a hand in guiding and creating their own educational pathway. If a student only wants to know something so that they can get a passing grade on a test, then they are not interested in or engaged in learning, they are only trying to check boxes. If a teacher can get to the student’s passion and interest them in learning something new and intriguing, then that students is going to actually enjoy the learning process and will want to know the information for more than just passing a test. This belief about teaching and learning relate most to the Constructivism theory of learning. This theory of learning shifts the focus of education from the teacher to the student in that it is all about empowering the student to be actively engaged in their learning through hands on techniques used to create their own knowledge, and then to assess how those techniques are helping them learn (Educational Broadcasting Corporation, 2004). This is why I think it is so important to get student by-in for this type of teaching, as it is a process that requires the students to be active participants, not passive learners.

In this vein, the learning outcome that I would most like to foster in my students is the ability to use critical thinking to approach and solve problems. The thing that most often trips people up in an English Language Arts classroom is the concept that there is no one right answer. It is sometimes a difficult concept to convey to students that, as their teacher, I am not looking for a single correct statement but am instead looking for a well thought out answer that is supported by evidence from the text. This is the most important thing that a student can take away from instruction in an English Language Arts classroom. Beyond school, no one, for the rest of their lives, will be asking them to provide a single, correct, contextless answer to a simple question. Every situation they face in college, or the workplace, will require a reasoned and supported answer. In order to provide my students with this skill that they will need to carry forward in their lives, I will rely on two instructional strategies: close reading, and providing high-quality and timely feedback.

Teaching close reading to students involves teaching them to break down a text to determine what it explicitly says, making logical inferences based on the structured ideas within a text, and citing textual evidence from to support their conclusions (James, 2022). By proving students with this framework, they will have the skill required to approach any problem they encounter, no matter how complex, and break that problem down to its constituent parts in order to turn a complex issue into many smaller and easier to solve issues. Once that is done, they will be able to rely on their ability to make logical inferences and support their conclusions with textual evidence to respond to these hypothetical complex issues. This is the power of teaching students how to think critically and solve problems versus rote memorization.

Along with teaching close reading, a focus on providing high-quality and timely feedback to students as an instructional strategy helps those students achieve mastery faster and with less stress. “Making feedback … routine, frequent, and expected normalizes the process and reduces learners’ and teachers’ anxiety around feedback in general” (Griffiths et al., 2016). As this quote expresses, feedback is something that a student at first assumes is a wholly negative experience, proof that the student did something wrong and needs to be corrected. By focusing on making feedback a learning and growth experience instead of a punitive experience, students will come to learn that they are not being told they are wrong, they are being shown how they can be better and achieve mastery. This is especially important in the context of critical thinking as it empowers the student to make mistakes on their way to solving a problem or answering a question. The student will not be in fear of being punished for an error through a negative and embarrassing correction or a reduction in their grade but will instead know that making a mistake is a step on their road to mastering a skill.

The assessment tools that I will use to monitor and measure my students’ mastery of the critical thinking skill will be rubrics and reflections utilizing Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle. I feel that the use of rubrics reframes the process of classroom learning by making it clear to students exactly what is expected from them in order to show their mastery of a skill or concept. Instead of having a vague concept of an A being perfect and a B needing some work, etcetera, a rubric tells a student right at the beginning of a project or assignment what they need to show or produce. In line with the Constructivism teaching philosophy, rubrics empower students to be accountable for their own performance by clearly showing the teacher’s expectations and how to meet them. Through the use of rubrics, I will be able to easily measure my students’ mastery of critical thinking skills by providing my students with a clear framework they can use to show their growth from novice to mastery.

I will also be using reflections as an assessment tool to measure my students’ growth to mastery of critical thinking skills. I believe that it is vital for a student to understand how they earned the grade that they did on an assignment, project, or assessment so that they can learn form their potential mistakes and grow from the experience. Instead of just putting an assignment away when it is completed, the Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle “offers a framework for examining experiences” allowing students to “learn and plan from things that either went well or didn’t go well” (Gibbs, 2013). I would use this instructional tool in my classroom to give my students every opportunity to show their mastery of the skills and concepts that I am teaching them. I would be able to use these reflections to augment any assignments, projects, or assessments my students have completed allowing them the opportunity to learn and grow from any mistakes they may have made, or the opportunity to bask in the knowledge that they were able to show mastery of a skill or concept without the need for revision.

It is vital that education be a collaborative process. The responsibility to provide a proper education of a class of students cannot rest on one head alone. A teacher requires support and engagement from all school stakeholders in order to achieve that lofty goal. As can be seen by my embrace of the educational theory of Constructivism, I do not believe that a student can be educated in a way that promotes critical thinking and growth if they do not have a hand in the learning process. It is therefore incumbent upon the teacher to build a rapport with their students in order to engender that active engagement in their own education. If the students are not engaged, then they are passive learners, and passive learners do not grow into successful critical thinkers. To support the goal of a collaborative educational process, I would utilize clear and open channels of communication with all educational stakeholders. I would make sure that, through proactive data collection and analysis, I have timely, accurate, and informative data to share with all stakeholders involved in my students’ education. From informing parents or guardians about upcoming projects or possible issues with their child to apprising administration of any trends that are appearing in my data so they can properly respond to them, collecting and disseminating this and any data that can assist in improving my students’ education experience is of paramount importance. This engagement in my students’ education from all stakeholders can only stand to improve the quality of that education and lead to students who are confidant and passionate critical thinkers.

Educational Broadcasting Corporation. (2004). Constructivism as a Paradigm for Teaching and Learning. 

https://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/constructivism/index_sub6.html

Gibbs, G. (2013). Learning by Doing. Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development. 

https://thoughtsmostlyaboutlearning.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/learning-by-doing-graham-gibbs.pdf

Griffiths, J. M., Luhanga, U., McEwen, L. A., Schultz, K., & Dalgarno, N. (2016). Promoting high-quality feedback. Canadian Family Physician, 62(7), 600–602.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4955091/

James, K. (2022, October 25). How to Teach Close Reading | Curriculum Associates. 

https://www.curriculumassociates.com/blog/how-to-teach-close-reading