Thinking back on what strategies one of my favorite teacher used made me appreciate how hard she worked so much more than I did while I was in high school. My senior English teacher used many different strategies to help us learn. I didn't realize it at the time, but now that I've started teaching, I can see the different strategies she used to help facilitate learning to everyone in our class. When I was in her class I had no idea what she was doing, but looking back I can see that she was very intentional with some strategies that she would use. The strategies she used were cooperative group learning, community circle, and graduated difficulty.
As a math person, English has never been my strong suite(which I'm sure some of you could tell based off reading these blogs), so I think my teacher using cooperative learning groups helped me tremendously during my senior year. We would be in groups of 3-4, with every group having someone who excelled in English being paired with 2-3 others who weren't so great. Our team leader would often help drag us along by helping us find the main idea in a passage, reviewing comma rules with us, or pointing out what themes the writer was trying to portray. As a logical thinker, I was not very good at reading between the lines to find deeper meanings that we're necessarily spelled out in the writing. My teacher realized that I was not the only one like this in our class, so she made sure to have a more creative thinker in our groups to help us out. I also think this helped me learn because I was more likely to ask my classmate a question than I was to ask my teacher. Having a group of friends that would roast each other at any chance we got typically led to not asking questions in class to avoid asking a dumb question. Having our team leader to ask questions to made it much easier to learn in her classroom. The second strategy she would use quite often was the community circle method. We typically did this any class period where we were supposed to read something the night before. If we were supposed to read a couple of chapters in a novel, or read a short story, we would always come into class, arrange our desks into a large circle, and she would facilitate discussion during the class period. This forced me to read because I was terrified that I would be called one to answer a question about the reading. More importantly, I was able to hear different ideas and views from my classmates about the reading. As I stated earlier, as a logical thinker, I never even thought about some of the theme and ideas that my classmates would bring up. So being able to sit and listen to multiple students discuss what they thought about a passage, helped me learn more about the passage than I would have ever gotten from just reading the story. The last strategy my teacher would use was graduated difficulty. I was not very good at English, however, I am very competitive. So when she would give us an assignment with level 1, level 2, or level 3 difficulty, I would always choose level 3 difficulty because I did not want my friends be able to do something that I couldn't. This led to me having to really focus and try much harder than I would if she would not have given us different options. Since I was working harder than I normally would, I learned much more during my senior year than I did most of my other English classes. At the time, I had no idea what my teacher was doing, but as I continue learning different strategies, I constantly see how hard she worked to use different strategies while teaching. Even though she had been teaching for well over 20 years, she still didn't depend on one single way of teaching, but she looked at our needs and adjusted her style accordingly.
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The whole idea of trying to project what technology we will have in 10 years is a little bit intimidating. I think before we can even start looking into the future, we need to look back 10 years to see what technology was introduce so we can see how far we've come. Here's a small sample of what was introduced to us back in 2010.
Obviously, these three steps are not all inclusive, there are probably many other ways that will help us. But I believe if we follow these three relatively simple steps, then whenever we are required to implement technology to meet standards, we will be ready. Hello Everyone!
My name is Luke, and I am currently a 7th grade math teacher and head soccer coach at Clarkdale High School in Meridian. I received my Bachelor's Degree is in Computer Science from MSU in 2015, and after a few years of sitting at a computer all day every day, I decided I wanted a change. I was already coaching high school soccer(and loved it), so I decided to find a way into teaching. I started the Alt Route program at Southern last summer, and I will be finishing up this December. Between my undergrad and this program, I've taken roughly 10-12 classes online. This past school year was my first year teaching, but it was my second year coaching. I have quite a bit of knowledge with technology software skills. Since my Undergrad was in Computer Science, I had to use quite a bit of technology during that time. I also spent 2.5 years as a software support technician, where I also had to use a wide range of different software. I am very comfortable using some of the basic software such as word/google docs, power point/google slides, etc. I can also generally find my way around other software, even if I haven't used it much. All of our students have a gmail account, so I generally tried to use google's software so it would be easy to share with my students. I used google slides pretty much every day for my class for either announcements or the lesson. For communication, I have mostly used email, but I have also used blogs, discussion boards, video conferencing, and google hangouts. I might be a little old school in thinking this, but I prefer email to communicate. I am able to get all of the emails directly to my phone so it's easy and convenient. I do not mind using any of the other methods, but email is my preferred method. With regards to education, I have not used technology as much as I would like too. I have a classroom set of Chromebooks, so I do use those quite often. I'll use Kahoot to review, or assign Khan Academy lessons so the students are getting a different teaching style than how I do it. I have even used an online testing site to give the students quizzes/tests. I would like to start implementing technology more often into my lessons, though. As far as my teaching philosophy, I believe that school is meant to teach students skills that will help them make society a better place once they're out of high school. I try to make sure that I am not only teaching students Math, but I also am teaching them skill that they will use for the rest of their life. |
AuthorMy name is Luke Smith. I am a middle school Math teacher and a High School Soccer coach. Blog Roll Ashleigh Bowen Melanie Bryan Kathryn Bubrig Mara Chitic-Holmes Terry Cullum Lauren Delaune Kelly Hudson Lindsey Jones Rachel Long Jana Milsap Jonathan Mooneyham Nicole Musselwhite Daleana Phillips Melissa Queen Derrick Routon Amelia Watson ArchivesCategories |