Stewart R Teaching Philosophy

Ruthie Stewart EDSC 7550 02/10/2019 Teaching Philosophy When it comes to teaching, I am most influenced by the “catch phrase”, for lack of a better term, of the school I attended from pre-K through 3rd grade, while my family lived in Chattanooga. The name of this school was St. Nicholas, and their “catch phrase” was, “How you learn lasts forever.” That phrase was something instilled in teachers and students alike, and every day it reminded teachers to provide meaningful experiences for young learners, and for young learners to be open to whatever was happening in class that day. A mutual trust and respect existed between students and teachers because of this catch phrase, that I knew and held dear from the age of 3. How you learn lasts forever. Now, as a teacher, that catch phrase echoes in my mind. I want to focus first on how students are learning content rather than the content itself. When designing lessons and assessments, I try to ensure students are always employing useful strategies and skills when exploring, working with, and learning the content at hand. By “useful”, I mean that these strategies and skills can be applied to other situations and content, and that students build an understanding of how to tackle problems, even when they don’t necessarily know all the facts of a situation. The goal of my teaching is for students to need me less and less as a “disseminator of knowledge” as the year goes on, because they’re developing the skills and strategies needed to construct knowledge for themselves.

For this reason, my beliefs about teaching and learning align tightly to the Next Generation Science Standards and the 3-D teaching and learning model. 3D teaching and learning involves getting students to investigate “disciplinary core ideas”, or content, using the use of the 8 “science and engineering practices”, or skills, and then connect the core ideas to the “crosscutting concepts”, or ways to think about science content that hold true across the science disciplines (NGSS, 2019). Science teaching, for me, means providing students with opportunities to develop their proficiency in the science and engineering practices as well as opportunities to practice thinking about information in relation to the broader crosscutting concepts in order to help students develop the tools necessary to learn any science content. One specific example where I have helped students practice the practices and practice situating their knew knowledge in relation to the crosscutting concepts was in an honors biology class. The topic was human impact on the environment. The task was to predict what would happen to a river ecosystem where birth control was present in high levels due to human use and release through sewage. Students were provided with a real world example through an article discussing male fish becoming infertile when high levels of birth control are present in their environment, as well as with a sample food web of a river ecosystem in order to make their predictions. Predictions were made in a CER format, and students were expected to synthesize prior knowledge, information given, and any extra research they wished to conduct in order to make their predictions. By creating this task I did little in terms of what some may traditionally think of as “teaching”– I didn’t lecture, students didn’t necessarily have to take notes, and student thinking wasn’t confined by questions on a worksheet or procedural steps they had to

follow. Students took the lead and my job as a “teacher” was to provide them with the open-ended task itself, and then support them in making their predictions. I wasn’t sure, at first, whether or not this was a helpful lesson for students– it was so different from the types of lessons my mentor had been teaching all year. However, when the unit test (a common assessment for all biology classes) came back a week and a half after this lesson, and the standard that students performed best on in the honors classes was the standard addressing human impact. In doing the activity I’d planned, students had learned how to analyze a food web and look at cause and effect in order to evaluate the impact human activities had on an ecosystem. Though they worked with a single example, they skills they had built applied to different situations. In fact, none of the questions addressing human environmental impact on the test had to do with fish or birth control. It wasn’t the content of the lesson but the way they learned it that helped students to succeed. In my mind, based on the way I was taught growing up and the teaching strategies that have been successful with my students, teachers aren’t disseminators of knowledge, they’re facilitators in the construction of knowledge. When I talk about “teaching” I tend to talk about creating an environment and opportunities where my students can explore in order to learn. Developing skills takes them further than learning facts, and that is what I try to keep in mind in the classroom, in lesson planning, and in designing assessments.

References: NGSS. (2019, January 15). Next Generation Science Standards. Retrieved February 9, 2019, from https://www.nextgenscience.org/