Throughout my final two internships, I was able to learn a lot about the type of teacher I aspire to be, and I gained some insight as to how I could become that educator. Overall, I would say that my core beliefs about learning and teaching remained the same, but what I did learn (and what I continue to learn!) was how to educate in a manner conducive to my goals. To summarize my ideas about education in a short sentence: students in primary and secondary school should be guided to become community-oriented critical thinkers by educators willing to meet them halfway as far as their interests and desires.

 

Personally, my theory of learning is that students learn best through what I like to call a “gummy vitamin” approach. The students should of course receive academic and moral education (including education as to how to behave through classroom management) that will strengthen their minds in the same way that vitamins strengthen their bodies. However, they should receive this education in a form that is enjoyable, pleasing, and relevant to them — i.e., as a gummy candy. Classroom management is included in this theory— although classroom management likely will not be “pleasing” to the student who is receiving a consequence, it should, at the very least, be relevant— a student should know and understand their mistake, and the following consequences should be morally educational rather than arbitrarily punitive. In this way, the teacher will be able to assist their students in learning, and the students will not view learning as a “chore”, but rather, something that is fun, enjoyable, and most importantly, intrinsically motivating.

 

To further expand upon my theory of learning, I would like to discuss what I consider “education”. I believe that students should ideally be empowered to become critical thinkers, ready to navigate the plethora of political agendas, “alternative facts”, and general abundance of information in the 21st century world. I take a lot of inspiration from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Overall, his classroom model revolves around problem-posing education, which includes inquiry-based learning regarding the students’ positions in society and the combat of anti-oppressive structures (Excerpt of Freire, 1970, from Cahn S.N., 2012). I put great importance on teaching to social change. Given the lack of constraints as far as an ESL teacher’s content goes, I truly enjoy getting students to share their opinions, bounce ideas off each other, and reach a higher degree of critical thought as a classroom community. Similarly, I enjoyed reading the research brief by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics as well on productive classroom discussions— noting that even more formulaic knowledge can be derived from collaboration and inquiry (Cirillo, 2013) was a wake-up call for me— I had spent many precious teaching minutes talking at my students, when I could have allowed them to think for themselves in a way that would have appealed to them more than my voice. These concepts and areas of education are extremely important to me, and I believe they are essential to the educated person’s development.

In both classroom models, it is of note that the students are doing the bulk of the mental work, as opposed to the typical “sage-on-the-stage” model of teaching— I prefer to see a more collaborative, communicative classroom. I believe that just knowing the answers isn’t enough for our current competitive society, or even something worth striving for— after all, most of us have smartphones, or at least access to a device that can get to Wikipedia. Instead, knowing how to get to a response— or how to pose even more questions in light of the response, or understanding why the question was asked in the first place— is the skillset that the Generation Z students need. This is why debates and class/group discussions tend to dominate my teaching— I am a proud over-user of the Think-Pair-Share technique, but the students do not seem to mind!

 

In order to teach to this skillset through a “gummy vitamin” approach, I drew inspiration from William Glasser’s approach to the classroom. Glasser states that, among other things, that quality teaching (which produces high effort and good behavior in students) comes about through “useful work”— information and topics that students see as important, and that they express an interest in. (Glasser, 1969, cited in Charles, C.M., 2014, 190). Thus, I choose topics that are personally close to students, and put a critical spin on them. Even aside from political topics, I make it a point to create dialogue with the students, and try to have them give me more information than I give them— after all, their voices and cultures are important and contain multitudes of interesting insight. Moreover, in terms of classroom management, it should be in place in order to protect the students’ rights to learn effectively and enjoyable in class (Glasser, 1969, cited in Charles, C.M., 2014, 190)— ergo, the whole class centers around learning interesting material in an environment conducive to that.

 

Most recently in my teaching experience, I have been able to give an assignment in which students present a “How-to” to the class on whatever topic they’re interested in. Suddenly, even the somewhat disengaged students were excited to teach the class their unique talents as they practiced the use of the imperative form and modal verbs. There are students who will be teaching about African dance, Moroccan music, WWI, physics, how volcanoes work, and how to draw birds, among other topics— and they are all incredibly excited to share their interests and knowledgebase with the class! This is particularly exciting as I personally could not teach them many of these things— the information is being created by and shared by the students, for the students’. They see the benefits of this assignment even if they do not see the benefits of the grammar points they are learning as they make their presentations, and are therefore putting in the effort to do a good job whilst learning the drier parts of English grammar. Moreover, the students remained on task for the most part, and the few that didn’t were straightened out by their peers before I even had to intervene. This is also in line with Glasser’s ideas, as he believes that there are rarely classroom management issues when the students are engrossed in useful work. (Glasser, 1969, cited in Charles, C.M., 2014, 193).

 

For the few students that did choose to persist in off-task behavior, I had to refer back to my classroom management plan, which borrows heavily from the ideas of Rudolf Dreikurs as well as Michael Linsin, writer for a teaching blog called Smart Classroom Management. My classroom management plan, as previously mentioned, aims to be relevant to the students, to teach a moral lesson, and to maintain classroom effectiveness and safety. I believe that student misbehaviors must have consequences tied to them that make sense to students and are directly related to their infraction (Dreikurs, 1968, cited in Edwards H.C., 2008), as an arbitrary consequence will simply feel like a punishment and foster resentment between one and their student. I have also incorporated elements of Linsin’s approach, in the sense that his approach is very focused on accountability. Linsin details specific rules for students that encompass the behaviors that he would like to see in class, and with each teacher intervention, the students have an increasingly severe consequence, from a mild warning to a call home (Linsin, A Classroom Management Plan that Works, 2010). Although Linsin uses the arbitrary punishments that I try to avoid, his strict adherence to enforcing consequences and the tiered structure has been useful in showing the students that I will follow through fairly and in a somewhat objective manner. Overall, I believe that, through these techniques, I have created a productive, just learning environment for students, in which students are aware that their actions have consequences and are able to learn from their mistakes.

 

Further to proper comportment, students need to be able to work collaboratively with their peers, myself, and the school as a whole. In my opinion, community is a very important notion to foster in students. Dreikurs believes that many misbehaviors stem from a feeling of being outside of the classroom community (Dreikurs, Grunwald, Pepper, 1988.) In order for each student to contribute to a classroom of collaborative learning they must feel as though their voice matters and that they will be safe in the classroom. That way, they are able to share their ideas safely, and without fear that their voices are somehow unimportant. In my classroom, there are no “dumb” questions or statements, and a zero-tolerance policy for unkindness towards classmates. Moreover, we should all be on the same side: we’re working together to create an effective, safe learning environment, and students who jeopardize this will receive some form of consequence.

 

In order to foster this community, rapport-building is invaluable. After all, if I do succeed in creating a group of critical thinkers, they would soon figure out that there are more of them than they are of me, and that there’s nothing stopping them from storming the classroom and stealing my desk! Though, in all seriousness, a community needs a caring, supportive, and motivated leader, and I believe that that’s what the teacher should be for a class. In order to build rapport between myself and the students, I turned to the work of Nel Noddings. Noddings wrote about the principles of care in great detail, and believed that educators needed to engross themselves in the well-being and development of each student (2007). Similarly, I believe that every student— regardless of how inappropriate their behavior may be, or how they may act with the other students— deserve to have a good, fruitful life. I try to meet every student with positivity and optimism, and I refuse to lose hope in even the students who seem to be trying to get me to give up on them. I’ve noted that even the students who don’t seem to particularly like me respect and see the fact that I am there for them, and that alone has seemed to quell many of the behaviors that are not conducive to the classroom climate. Moreover, it reinforces the fact that students are always welcome to participate and add to our learning environment. Lastly, modelling care for the students will hopefully cause them to replicate this in their own lives, which aligns itself with the “gummy vitamin” approach— students get to experience care, and are able to see a model of unconditional support (while seeing students who are unsupportive of others receive a consequence to discourage them from similar behavior in the future.)

 

Overall, while it would be ideal if students walked into class prepared for full engagement with the course material, I personally do not assign or expect a particular role from students— I believe that the teacher should take full responsibility for what is done in the classroom at all times. Students are typically the only people not consulted about whether or not they should be in school; they’re there because they have to be. As teachers, we are there because we want to help them, and so I believe it is our responsibility to pique their interest, to show a good example by being enthused in the learning process, to incorporate topics that make them want to participate, and to create lessons that are relevant in some way to the students’ own lives.

 

In one case, I had a student in a Secondary 1 class who refused to participate and often did not hand in assignments. At one point, I did a lesson on music, as students were learning about adjectives/adjective order. I chose songs of various genres, and had the class listen to excerpts. As they heard the songs, they wrote down various adjectives that they associated with the music. Afterwards, they wrote a paragraph-long response about their favorite song using the adjectives they wrote down. This student— who had only submitted one written piece of work before this lesson— submitted a wonderful response! Upon speaking to his mother later at Parent-Teacher night, I found that he had a fairly low self-esteem, and perceived himself as someone “on the fringes” due to behavioral challenges. However, she also told me that he was very interested in classic rock, and that the song choice may have inspired him to share his opinion despite generally feeling disengaged. After returning his assignment with an acknowledgement of his success, he seemed to become a bit more receptive to participating in class. I was able to re-engage this student with the classroom, and while he still had a few difficulties I was happy to see that there was an improvement. Through an activity that was enjoyable to him, and his re-introduction into the classroom community, he was able to improve his effort and drive to succeed in class.

 

I have quite a few aspects of my classroom practices figured out for now, but not everything is clear to me. As previously mentioned, I agree with Glasser that classroom management issues diminish significantly when students are doing work that appeals to them. I believe that students must be enthused about the topics they are being taught; however, one aspect of education that I am still working out is where the enthusiasm should stem from. My supervisor for my 3rd placement often told me to just “teach from the heart”— as long as I was interested in my lesson, the students would be too (S. Wald, personal communication, October 10th, 2017). I was also inspired by Palmer’s 1997 article entitled The Heart of a Teacher, in which Palmer encourages educators to simply teach from their selves, using their own interests and personalities as a springboard for teaching. The demonstration of a teacher’s authentic self and passion in and of itself is what captivates students. On the other hand, Glasser and many of my peers insist that it is more important to cater to student interests. Personally, I have done both, although I have found that while I can open a lesson to my student’s interests (such as with the How-to assignment), I have not been able to successfully teach lessons related to their interests. Typically, I’ve noted that when making jokes or statements relating to the student culture, they sink like lead in water— and I attribute this to the fact that I can only be so cool at school. As they keynote speaker of SPEAQ 2017 said, “[A teacher] will never be as interesting or as cool as YouTube” (G. Couros, SPEAQ Keynote, 2017). Overall, I felt as though I was giving students a watered-down version of their real interests. On the other hand, when I taught topics that I found fascinating, the students were eventually able to share my enthusiasm. At this point, I’m not sure if this can be attributed to the fact that students truly learn better when the teacher chooses the topics, or if I simply did not do enough to teach to student interests. I will continue to delve into this further and look forward to developing my perspective on it!

 

Overall, I believe that meeting the students half-way as far as content can go a long way as they continue to learn and grow in your classroom. Ensuring that students learn through a critical eye is also incredibly important for the modern world. Lastly, I see great importance in learning how to be a kind, accepting community member in the classroom. I look forward to refining and re-adjusting my classroom practices as I take on future placements and new challenges!

           

 

 

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Works Cited

 

 

Charles, C. M. (2014). “William Glasser on Releasing the Power of Positive Choice.” Building Classroom Discipline. 11th

Edition. Peason, pp. 183-204.

 

Cirillo, M. (2013). “What Are Some Strategies For Facilitating Productive Classroom Discussions?”, National Council of

Teachers of Mathematics. Virginia: The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, pp. 1-5.

 

Couros, G. (2017, November 24). Keynote 2017. Speech presented at SPEAQ in Sheraton Laval, Montreal.

 

Dreikurs, Rudolf, Bernice B. Grunwald, and Floy C. Pepper. Maintaining Sanity in the Classroom: Classroom Management

Techniques. Washington, D.C: Accelerated Development, 1998. Internet resource.

 

Edwards, H. C. (2008). Classroom Discipline and Management (5th ed.) Chapter 5: Logical Consequences: Rudolf Dreikurs.

San Francisco: Wiley. Pp. 95-123

 

Freire, P. (2012). “Pedagogy of the oppressed” (selection)” in Cahn, S. M. (Ed.), Classic and Contemporary Readings in the

Philosophy of Education. 2nd Edition. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 379-386.

 

Linsin, M. (2017, April 14). A Classroom Management Plan That Works. Retrieved December 1, 2017, from

https://www.smartclassroommanagement.com/2010/06/26/classroom-management-plan/

 

Noddings, Nel (2007). The one-caring as teacher. In Randall R. Curren (ed.), Philosophy of Education: An Anthology.

Blackwell Pub. 372-376.

 

Palmer, P. J. (1997). The Heart of a Teacher Identity and Integrity in Teaching. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning,

29(6), 14-21.

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