My Teaching Philosophy

My philosophy of teaching rests upon a single, very simple principle: every child can learn.  As teachers, we often need to spend a lot of time and energy finding out exactly how and from what point every child can learn, but the fact remains.  In that case, my philosophy of teaching essentially posits that a teacher’s job is to learn, as quickly and accurately as possible, where his or her children are in relation to the material, learn what motivates the children, then provide opportunities for them to learn as much as they possibly can using those motivational constructs as necessary.

Children learn by assimilating new knowledge into the network of patterns and ideas that exists in their brains on Day One.  In order to make new knowledge fit into the framework already in place in a child’s mind, then, our instructional practices must strive to relate new and often disparate knowledge to what each child already knows. Good teachers know how to sift a set of knowledge or a skill or a concept and find the bond that will make this new information fit neatly into most children’s existing neural networks.  Some students are very open to new knowledge by virtue of coming to school with a vast and far-reaching network of background knowledge.  Other students come to us with a more limited network, and it is with these students that we must typically work the longest and sometimes the hardest in order to build backward until we are able to connect to some meaningful idea in these children’s minds.  That is how instruction assists in learning.  Instructors, by virtue of our familiarity with our students, offer the meaningful connection that will allow each one to add to the pattern of ideas that lives in his or her mind and helps him or her to make the world make sense.

Strong teachers never stop looking for the connection between the idea to be taught and the neural network that must receive it.  They never give up on a child; never believe that a child cannot learn.  Somewhere in each of our vast webs of experiences, if we look hard enough and long enough, we will find a book or a film, a place or a game, a toy or a sport…something that will provide the connection between what we wish to teach and what makes sense to a child.

In my classroom, I see students for two different purposes during the day, but the fundamental approach with each group of kids is essentially the same.  Whether I am asking my G/T and Honors English students to analyze and evaluate the similarities between “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” or looking for a way to explain the importance of strong note-taking skills to a dyslexic child who is on the cusp of reading at the same level as his peers for the first time in his life, I start with something general with which I think most of my children will be familiar.  Then I move from face to face looking for the “A-ha!” The spark of understanding.  For the vacant faces, I go deeper and farther afield.  I ask questions and learn about each child until I learn something that I can fit to the content I am teaching.  The better I know my kids, the easier this process is, so I work to know them as well as any teacher can.  I listen, pay attention, and take note, so that when the teachable moment arrives, I can shower them with knowledge and help them grow into someone stronger than the person each of them was yesterday.

Innovation in Education

Innovation is an unusual word to have to tackle, here.  Webster’s Dictionary defines innovation as “the introduction of something new; a new idea, method, or device”.  When I think about my process and even the rudiments of my classroom environment, I do not immediately think of something new.  Rather, I think of something very, very old.

Before the current paradigm of compulsory public education was introduced in the late 19^th Century, most average citizens of the United States were educated for whatever years their lives allowed at whatever points in time their lives allowed.  These students would gather in a single room regardless of age or gender, and they would learn from a single teacher who serviced the entire population of school-aged children in the region.  This is how I see my classroom.  We are going back to the little red schoolhouse because something incredible and valuable and irreplaceable became necessary in that context: the teacher had to individualize instruction for each child.

I have four classes during my work day that are titled, “Reading Improvement”.  There are 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th graders together in each of those course sections.  The children in those classes read on anywhere from a 3^rd grade level to a 6^th grade level, and there is no guarantee that one can match ability to anything as superficial as age or grade.  I must assess and monitor and evaluate and meet and talk with and get to know every one of them as an individual.  I must learn where they are in their reading, and I must learn what they know. I have to learn what motivates each one, and I have to put those motivations on the table and entice each one to come a little bit closer to grade-level each and every day they are with me.

My other students are enrolled in “English Language Arts and Reading Pre-AP”, and they require the same kind of differentiated instruction in order that every child in the classroom progresses.  In that class, I have regular students who are optimistic about their future success and others who are very bright and are the very souls for whom the Advanced Placement program was designed.  I also, though, have children who’ve been labeled Gifted and Talented, and these are another creature altogether.  I have heard it said that, if one thinks of the human mind as a television set, and we average folks have three or four channels going on in our minds, the genius level child can have anywhere between 100 and 5,000 channels going on in his or hers.  The G/T child does not learn in the same ways as the average or even the bright child.  So, again, I differentiate and strive to teach each child – from his point of need and ability to his highest potential.

Now, there is one bit of Webster’s definition that I do have and put to work daily – “a new…device”.  I have devices.  My reading students read in tandem with audio cassettes, mp3’s, and ebooks that generate text-to-speech audio tracks as one reads.  We use computers for comprehension testing, weekly progress monitoring assessments, monthly diagnostic testing, and weekly skills practice.  My Pre-AP students type their essays and research papers into desktop keyboards that connect to my computer via a radio frequency (RF) transmitter then submit them to a web-based assessment program that uses advanced algorithms to assess, evaluate, and advise them in their work.  We write directions using a Google map of Beaumont displayed on an interactive whiteboard and submit those within our online classroom.

My innovation, then, is to take an idea that worked well and still does and use it launch kids into the 21^st Century.

Education Issues & Trends

            The biggest issue facing educators today is the need to rethink the paradigm that forces students and teachers to be accountable for their progress by standardized tests that most stakeholders perceive as punitive rather than diagnostic.  It is important to understand that I, as an educator and as a parent, do not disagree with the need to assess students and monitor their progress.  Assessment and progress monitoring are the tools that teachers, doctors, auto mechanics – anyone who strives to find deficits and make improvements – must use in order to diagnose problems and implement solutions. The issue, rather, is the reality that the original diagnostic intention behind standardized testing has been turned upside-down so that teachers now enter into a career in which they are too often made to believe that the standardized test score is all and absolute, that if their students do not demonstrate standardized success, then they are failures.

            The result of this reversal of intention and reality has become a sometimes grim education system in which too many teachers trade out teaching the curriculum in favor of teaching the test.  This system leaves behind the entire notion of teaching the child, although that is exactly what we are called to do.  Instead of teaching children from their individual points of need to their highest potentials, many teachers train them to pass exams that will move them through the system to the next level but leave them unprepared for the realities of life and career.  This predicament has been growing for years, exemplified by poll after poll of business owners who complain constantly not only that graduates are ill-trained but that they often do not even possess the necessary skills to be adequately trained.  We must find a way, as educators, to end this cycle of defeat for children and for our communities.

            The solution to this situation must obviously be a multi-faceted one.  If there were a magic wand, someone would long ago have waved it.  The first step toward a solution, though, is pretty straight forward: Start teaching children, again. In its 2004 revision to the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, the United States Congress mandated that public education systems in America adopt a framework that would find children with learning deficits as early as possible, intervene at those children’s areas and points of need, and monitor their progress until they no longer operated at the previous deficit. These structures are called Response to Intervention (RtI) frameworks, and if we, across the nation, implement a genuine RtI paradigm in all of our schools – screening students in reading and math in first grade through twelfth, locating students who are operating below grade level, and giving those students the extra time and instruction they need in these fundamental areas – we will be well on our way to achieving a dream most of us share – that every child graduates high school with the ability to read and apply mathematical concepts to their lives.  The second step toward a solution is that public policy based on standardized test scores must be redrawn so that improvement from one year to the next reflects classroom success. From this perspective, the test becomes a diagnostic tool that informs future instruction. This would go a long way toward abolishing the perspective that these tests are punitive and could provide the relief that many teachers need to feel before they will be comfortable abandoning the “teach the test” model of teaching.  And finally, teachers must go back to the very correct philosophy that our jobs are not to teach content; our job is to teach children.

            Every teacher I know loves children and wants to help each one succeed.  This is not a far-fetched dream.  We need only to look at the picture from a different perspective to see the way to achieve it.

And....he's back.

So...Yeah. It's been a long time since I've been here.  I find myself saying that so much in blogspace that it's becoming a mantra.  Anyway, I've decided to get more bang for my buck and publish some stuff here that has either been prepared for other purposes which now are done or have been published elsewhere and have run their course in those publications.  So look for a few new things here in the next few hours, and then there should be more in the coming weeks.  Sorry for letting the dust pile up again.