My Educational Philosophy

My educational philosophy has definitely changed since I first arrived at UAB.  In the Fall of 2008, when I first began taking education courses, I felt that classrooms should be teacher-centered.  I mean, after all, I was the one who went to college four years (actually - longer than that, but who's counting?).  I felt that the students should sit down, shut up, and listen to what I had to say.  In hindsight, I'm very thankful that I was not unleashed on any of Alabama's classrooms.  I would've been a monster!  No one would have wanted to have me as a teacher!

Now, my educational philosophy has basically taken a complete one-eighty.  While I'm not completely against lecture (indeed, there are appropriate times for it), I feel that adolescents learn more visually and by hands-on, project-based instruction.  Depending on which statistics you look at, the average person (teen or adult) thinks 75-80% in pictures/images and only 20-25% in words.  Thus, students are much more likely to remember things you show them than things you tell them.

I've also become a much bigger fan of differentiated instruction.  Obviously, different people learn in different (or various) ways.  If a teacher only uses one approach to instruction (which was my original plan back in 2008), many students are going to fall through the cracks.  It is imperative that teachers use several different approaches to teaching content - be it projects, lecture, collaborative assignments, or technology.  By incorporating numerous methods of instruction, teachers are much more likely to reach every student.

Finally, one of my goals as a teacher is to create life-long learners.  If a teacher's instruction is boring or dated, the students are not likely to enjoy the content, which means they will probably not become life-long learners in that particular area.  Hence, it is my goal to make learning FUN!!!  Good instruction engages students through activities that are enjoyable, challenging, practical (i.e. usable in real-life situations), and relevant to the 21st century student (i.e. students who utilize technology on a regular basis).  If instruction meets these criteria, students are much more likely to enjoy the content, which increases the odds of the student becoming a life-long learner in that particular content area.

Thus, it is my goal as a Language Arts instructor to implement creative, enjoyable, and technologically current instruction into my daily classroom activities; to explore new and unique ways of piquing student's interest in reading, writing, and analyzing literature; and to instill in my students a desire to keep reading, writing, and analyzing literature long after they have left the K-12 setting.

Concerning this particular semester - if I'm being honest - I cannot say that my educational philosophy has changed drastically.  For a while now, I have begun to see the importance of differentiated instruction and the value of incorporating technology into classroom activities.  If anything, EHS 401 has simply reaffirmed that belief.  What has been a huge help, however, is learning the 4MAT method.  The 4MAT method has shown me specifically how and when to utilize certain pedogogical strategies and when those strategies are most effective/helpful for the student.  Without EHS 401, I would have never realized that there is a specific time in a unit where showing a video clip (or lecturing, or doing a project, etc.) is more effective than at any other time.  That was a real eye-opener for me.

While this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with my educational philosophy, another area in which EHS 401 has helped me is in pacing myself during a unit.  Before this course, I had no idea how long I should spend doing any one activity - be it lecturing, creative projects, showing videos, etc.  Now, however - thanks to Dr. Meadows and the 4MAT method - I know about how long I should spend in each quadrant of the wheel.  This alone, I believe, will make me a better teacher.

So, has my entire pedigogical philosophy changed because of this one course?  No.  But has it helped me identify weaknesses in my philosophy and shown me areas in which I need to improve?  Absolutely.  The bottom line is that not everyone learns the same way I do.  And in order to be an effective teacher, I have to be able to accommodate different learning styles.  EHS 401 has not only helped me to realize this, but it has also shown me how to effectively teach across the learning spectrum.

Bad Lesson Plan

So, for my EHS 401 class, in addition to finding several good lesson plans, we also had to find a bad lesson plan.  My bad lesson plan comes from LessonPlanPages.com.  Ultimately, its not that this lesson has no potential whatsoever, its just that it seems very poorly put together.  It comes across as something a teacher threw together at the last minute, or perhaps he/she was brainstorming and simply wrote down a few of his/her ideas.  Obviously, during the initial stages of a lesson plan, we all have some pretty terrible ideas - but most of us don't publish them on the web!

After reading S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, students are supposed to write a fake letter to the newspaper justifying Bob's (a character in the novel) death.  The teacher breaks the class into collaborative groups, gives them 30 vocabulary words, and makes them write the "letter" using all 30 vocabulary word in - get this - five minutes!!  What the?!!  I've got news for you, that's gonna' be the crappiest letter ever written!

Anyway, I've rambled long enough.  Click the link above and feast your eyes on this disaster of a lesson plan.

Active Learning

In my EHS 401 class, my professor divided us into groups and told us to begin searching for lesson plans that exhibit our favorite qualities.  For example, if you're a teacher and you like lesson plans that incorporate technology, then those are the type of lesson plans you would be looking for.  For me, my favorite type of lessons are those that incorporate active learning.  By active learning, I mean that students are actively engaged in the learning process.  They're doing something - not just sitting in their desk while the teacher stands at the front of the room, disseminating information.  Having said all this, I present to you four lesson plans that (in my opinion) do an excellent job of exhibiting active learning:

1)  http://rockhall.com/education/resources/lesson-plans/sti-lesson-48/

This first lesson plan is actually from the rock and roll hall of fame (of all places!)  It's designed for classes that are reading S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders.  It requires students to research and discuss musical artists and songs that are mentioned in the text.  The students must consider why Hinton thought it important to mention these songs in her text and how the themes in the songs comply with the themes in the novel.  Afterward, students are required to find three modern-day songs that also comply with the themes in the text.  This is a perfect example of a lesson plan that gets students actively involved in the learning process.  They get to use the computer (which all students love) and it incorporates the arts (what kid doesn't get excited about music?!).  Overall, I love this lesson plan.

2) http://alex.state.al.us/lesson_view.php?id=29864

This lesson plan is from the Alabama Course of Study.  It's designed for 11th graders (who are required to study Propaganda).  In this lesson, students are given the seven techniques of propaganda and are then shown a Coca-Cola commercial that uses one of the seven techniques (the commercial uses the Bandwagon technique).  Students are then placed in collaborative groups and get to create their own two-minute commercial in which they must incorporate various techniques of Propaganda.  take a look!

3)  http://alex.state.al.us/lesson_view.php?id=11443

This is another cool lesson plan from the Alabama Course of Study.  It's designed for classes that are reading Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird.  In addition to requiring students to write an essay on the novel, students also get to watch the film.  After watching the film, students are given the option to either 1) build a model, 2) paint a picture, or 3) draw a sketch of their favorite scene from the novel.

4) http://www.mcrel.org/compendium/activityDetail.asp?activityID=34

This final lesson plan is from an educational website named McRel.  The lesson plan is designed for 6-8th graders who are learning how to decipher between fact and opinion in non-fiction texts (such as diaries, autobiographies, and memoirs).  The students are assigned a text and, after reading it, are broken into collaborative groups where they discuss and write down specific examples of fact and opinion in the text.  Afterward, the teacher leads the class in a discussion and conducts a debate between students over why certain scenes from the text are/are not fact or opinion.