I've come back to this video numerous times in order to receive inspiration for my profession. Sir Ken Robison (2013) mentions that there are three principles for the human mind to flourish. When I first came to teaching I didn't know a standard from a formative assessment. It took a professional credential program to teach me these names and strategies, the unfortunate and fortunate thing was that it didn't teach me how to teach. As Robinson mentions (2013) teaching is a creative art, which I fully believe in. After my credential program I began the process of teaching a 7th grade class and the first year I was awful and I attribute that to my lack of creativity. Instead of teaching for the sake of having my students learn, which was the focus for my university (UCSC), I was focusing on having my students pass the test. After that first year I learned a valuable lesson, I learned to teach like I wanted to learn. Yes as Robinson points out, I still had to adhere to standardize testing and making sure I had results to back up my lesson and my form of teaching and for the most part I did a bit better than my fellow teachers which allowed me to switch one of my classes to a project based focus.
When I watched this video for the first time about a year or two years ago I became enthralled by its message to let creativity free. In my own career, only after a year of teaching did I feel myself trapped by the need to provide test scores and results. Knowing full well that this was not and is not the way (well not in terms of how you teach at least). I haven't learned everything I need to learn in order to feel like I have made an impact for my students but as I think more about the process of how I teach and what I teach and when and how I start to discover new ways, which are probably old ways of teaching. As I look back at this year I'm discovering that my class has transformed from a middle school class to something resembling a mesh between that and a college class. I fear for some of my students because when they reach high school I don't know if they will have the same experience they had with me, I hope they have a better one but if they don't I fear some might get discouraged and not do as well or even worse drop out because their creativity will be stifled. Reference Robinson, K. (2013, October 10). Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley. Retrieved June 12, 2015.
2 Comments
Jana
6/12/2015 11:12:35 pm
I completely understand your anxiety over the students not learning as they move from one teacher and teaching year to the next. Maybe there is a way to foster copying stills in our students so they can work through those dry boring teachers. If you can think of a way to show how to empower your students so they can be successful in any situation I would love you to share so I can use that for my students too.
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6/13/2015 08:43:43 am
What a great blog post! Very inspirational. It sounds like you have done a lot in the way of project-based learning and have given your students a lot of freedom and motivation for learning. Even if your students do not move on and have the exact same experience with other teachers, they will always remember their experience they had with you. I feel like many educators feel that way. We all hope to make some sort of impact and hope it stays with that child long enough to make a difference in their lives. Keep up the great work! I hope I can continue growing professionally in the same manner.
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AuthorI'm Mr. D and I have been teaching technology for a better part of 12 years. Welcome to my blog! ArchivesCategories |