Saturday, February 5, 2011
February 5th, 2011
So what makes an effective teacher? Discipline? Knowledge? Care? These answers may be true but I feel that they have become outdated and perhaps replaced by a new set of standards. Teachers now need to be aware of the importance of creativity, innovation, and acceptance. In my opinion, we should be providing students with an opportunity to learn in a variety of different ways. We should challenge students by including multiple methods of teaching in our lessons. We should promote creativity as a form of problem solving. We should be aware of individual differences among students. We should understand that times have changed, today's students have changed, and there is an increasing potential for technology in the classroom. There are many aspects that make up an effective teacher. The question is, how can we take these ideas and formulate a teaching philosophy that will be successful in educating students in today's school system?
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Like it Lindsay started my own little blog as well blog as well effectiveteachingideas@blogspot.com.
ReplyDeleteHow would you be creative in math? Something I'm working on figuring out for Biology. I like the teaching strategies they've shown so far i just feel like many of them are better for english and socials as compared to sciences.
As a socials teacher I do agree that a lot of the stratagies would apply to my subject of teaching, however I think if you think outside of the box you can still be more creative in teaching science and math subjects. I think that biology might be a bit easier then math still as there is a lot of opportunities that students can work together to learn concepts and increase their knowledge on the subject. For example in biology 12, if you are teaching the digestive system, you might have the kids split into groups and assign them into a different part of the digestive system and present in any form (picture, build a diagram, make a web page, make a game etc.) and teach/present the class with what they have learnt.
ReplyDeleteI haven't every really given math a lot of thought, but perhaps this can be an area that you can really implement technology. Set up a blog or other discuession website where students can post questions they are having problems with or set up study groups. Sometimes you will find a strong student can get across an idea in a different way then you can and that may work better for another student.
The strategies we learn in class I think are more a starting point to get us thinking outside the box, and from here we have to formulate out own ideas.
That is a great question Mr. McKelvie. I think that creativity is already used, in a less obvious way, in mathematics. When a student is working on a math problem they are using creative methods such as problem solving to come up with a solution. When a student doesn't understand a specific method of answering a math question, they may create another method that makes more sense to them. This is still a form of creativity even though it doesn't fit into the stereotype of creativity only being used in art and music. To me creativity is thinking of new ideas or possibilities in any area of life. Specific examples for how to be a more creative teacher in math might include more group work and peer help within the class. When students get a chance to work with others on their math homework they can feed off the ideas of others to create their own ways of problem solving. Homework assignments can be more creative than just doing questions from the textbook. For example, in a graphing unit, ask students to create a picture using only lines and curves they can write equations for. Get the students to include a list of at least 10 equations used in their assignment. Poster projects are always a great way to incorporate creativity into a classroom. In a probability unit, an example of a group project could include a poster assignment on a poll of the class’s favourite colour. With the data collected from classmates, the group could then create probability questions such as: what are the chances of 2 randomly selected girls liking the colour red? Each group could poll the class on anything of their choice. This activity allows for creativity and it is something out of the ordinary to keep students engaged in the class.
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