Week 3: Blog post
My original view on teaching when I started had very
little to do with what other teachers, or even the school were doing. I was concerned about what was happening in
my classroom and trying to have students accomplish the most learning
possible. Over the last few years I have
been convinced (especially through Walden) that involvement with other
teachers, the school, and the community is necessary in order to accomplish my original
goal of learning in the classroom.
I have become the head of our new teacher training
program at our school which can help the new teacher assimilate into our
culture and establish expectations that the school has of the teacher both in
classroom management and procedures, and in teaching content knowledge. In this role I can demonstrate the use of
inquiry and reinforce the usefulness of the strategy. Before signing off on
their training I also have them accomplish an inquiry lesson that is reviewed
by the principle. The biggest challenge
that I have had in this role is having the new teachers buy into the process of
inquiry enough to continue to use it in their classroom from year to year. One teacher in particular came over from
another school and had been teaching for about five years already. This teacher wants to teach the students by
giving students questions and having them read the textbook to answer
them. It was very difficult to break
this habit since reading is often pushed in the district much more than science
education. I stressed to this particular
teacher that although the strategy of reading and finding answers to questions
was not a bad thing to learn, this strategy only would be successful to certain
types of learners, most would not learn the information and would just copy the
answers down when found. There was no
application of the concepts afterword.
This allowed me to stress inquiry a solution for his differentiation
issue. Although this is still a work in
progress, he has made some strides in differentiation of his instruction
through the use of inquiry.
David good luck with this program. It is important to try and break the old cycle of read the text and answer questions. This is a task that I myself find boring and do not do in my class. It is important to involve students in inquiry lessons. This can be difficult especially if this is not how the person was trained in college.
ReplyDeleteIt is difficult for teachers to change. I am glad that your fellow worker is at least tying to change. Unfortunately I have met teachers who are just comfortable with what they are doing and will not even try to change. A reason I have heard in my own building is that when students to inquiry in science it takes a lot of time. However, time will always be an issue. Good luck with your program. I hope that you are enjoying being the head of the new teacher training program.
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