MAT671 - Assignment 1 Part A
Greetings, my name is Mike Taylor. I am a government teacher at a public charter school in Northern California, right outside of Sacramento. I received my preliminary teaching credential 5 months ago and am currently finishing up my masters of education with an emphasis in best practices. I have a bachelor's in applied law and ethics. My educational philosophy is similar to my life philosophy: focus on what you can control, do your best to not worry about what is outside your control. I know as I learn the craft and apply more best teaching practices I will have better class management, become more efficient at leading my students to learn the course content, and I will become better at always leading my students to see the practical application of what they learn. I want my class to be practical. I want my students to feel ready to research candidates, verify truth from fiction, vote accordingly, or even start a petition or run for office themselves. This all starts with knowing who does what and why in our political arena. If the average American currently knew all the course content of our common core government class our politics would be in a very different situation. My goal is to do my part by ensuring my students commit the content to long term memory and go out and apply it.
I took the Metarasa MMDI questionnaire personality quiz which was created to “deepen your self-awareness, improve your relationships, discover careers you will enjoy and become a better leader.” If that caught your curiosity you can do the quiz as well by following the link: https://www.metarasa.com/mmdi/questionnaire/
Upon completing the quiz I do feel that it depended my self awareness. This is what I scored:
But what does this mean? The E to I ratio means that I am moderately more introverted than extroverted. I agree. I love extroverted activities, such as teaching and performing stand up comedy, but I love reading and writing even more.
The S to N ratio means that I am slightly more into facts, data, and what is already known than I am into thinking about the unknown. As you can see I’m almost right in the middle. Good philosophy and good science are two sides of the same coin. Curiosity, coupled with rational inquiry of the unknown, is what leads us to finding, understanding, and applying data via the empirical method.
My T to F ratio is still fairly balanced, but I lean noticeably more toward the F. The T stands for thinking and using a detached, objective view to analyze and criticize. The F stands for feeling and using personal values. It makes sense that I saddle the middle but lean more towards personal values. I try to be objective and honest as I analyze and criticize, but I value my respect for autonomy, life and human dignity above all else. Teaching government is not cold political philosophy, it is emotionally engaging, even riveting at times. I do my best to be rational while recognizing all the emotions of the human experience. A purely objective and detached view of the world can lead one down the road of attempting to quantify and compare things that are not comparable without committing a categorical error, leading one to dismiss the uniqueness of each individual. There is no reason to dismiss human emotions at the expense of logic. Honesty demands recognizing that we are first emotional beings, and through the use of science and logic we can become self aware, understand our emotions, and make informed decisions which lead to self mastery.
My J to P is almost exactly smack dab in the middle, which means I am ever so slightly more open to the unknown and spontaneous action than I am towards making decisions which establish closure and lead to stability. Within my personal life I set goals and work hard to hit that stable closure of accomplishing them. I also recognize that life, with its infinite possibilities, is spontaneous and often prevents stability. The chaos of unpredictability is painful. Economic uncertainty is painful. Lack of trust due to unpredictable actions ruins relationships. One of my mantras is the only constant is nothing is constant. I do my best to create stability within an unstable world, and make peace with what is outside my control. That being said, I also crave certain types of new experiences. Teaching is fun because each class, full of different students, create different conversations. Hearing a new music genre for the first time, eating food I’ve never tasted before, traveling through a country I’ve never seen, I love that kind of spontaneous action.
Reviewing my quiz results, I can see how my personality will affect my relationship with my students. The biggest take away is my balance between taking an objective stance and following personal values. We all have personal values. Teaching facts is first and foremost objective. As a high school government teacher, I am teaching facts, not how to interpret them with conservative or liberal values. I’ve already had experiences where students ask me who I will vote for, or what political party I am a member of. I respond by saying I’ll let them know after they graduate. I need to always be vigilant and explain modern politics objectively. I usually do this by returning to the Constitution and the debates the Founding Fathers had amongst themselves. The Federalists and Anti-Federalists debated the balance of individual freedom versus government control that we still debate today. I must never say which one is correct in my opinion because that is not my job. My job is to present the facts and ask my students to tell me which one they think is correct. My job is to teach them how to validate their opinions with logical argumentation and validated evidence taken from the course content.
I currently use three different types of grouping in my class. The students sit in groups of four. I usually have students do independent activities, full class activities, activities in pairs, and small group activities. For the pairs the groups of four split into groups of two. For the small group activities they do some where they’re already sitting. Other times I hand out cards with Star Wars characters on them and they form groups with different class members. Most of my students are mid to high achievers. I have one English language learner and two students with an IEP. If it randomly turned out that I didn’t have higher achievers in the group with my English learner or my students with IEPs I would change the group to ensure that they’re working with higher achievers. I have two students who I do not have work together and keep sitting separately because they got in a fight in another class. I cycle through large group lectures and activities, independent work, and different types of small group activities during my class to keep students engaged. I usually switch gears at least every 10 minutes because that has prevented misbehavior and helped students stay engaged and on task.
With differentiation I adapt activities for students who need it, using a lot of SDAIE techniques including but not limited to scaffolding, bridging, schema-building, contextualization. Each year I’ve found that some of the adaptations I’ve made for one or two students actually would be a better teaching technique for all my students as I’ve learned more in my National University studies. I have the rubrics for my entire class to follow, but I use different rubrics when appropriate. For example, my English language learners get personalized rubrics for their essays based off their unique skill level. That way I am meeting them where they are and enabling them to progress rather than giving them something inappropriate for their skill level. I do the same with my IEP students. Also, I adapt activities with class presentations to meet students with high anxiety where they are. For all my students I use differentiation techniques according to their unique situation, meeting them where they are and then raising the expectation to where it is difficult but doable, again and again, so that they conquer each situation and grow and progress as they learn the course content and increase their academic skills.
Right now I use a Smartboard and google slides to organize each class. I make study guides to lead my students through their note taking and activities during class. I usually will show 3 to 10 minutes of videos over the course of my two hour class. Students use Chromebooks to write essays, do questionnaires and/or research. I play music as a timer during independent and group work. I use the game Kahoot! to review before unit tests. For this, my students choose their answers via their smartphones. (Other than that they’re phones must be on silent and in their backpacks or I’ll put them in my “phone box” until the end of class.) In the past they used Chromebooks because the internet speed on the phones varied too much for the game to be accurate. I also use the classic textbook, butcher paper, and white board. I usually use the white board for spontaneous explanations or explaining the same content using different types of diagrams according to the needs of the students in the moment. During group work butcher paper is sometimes used to create graphic organizers. Students also use google slides for presentations, and google docs to house their essays.
Following the directions for this activity I went to one more learning style website:
This was difficult because I don’t learn strongly to one side or the other. For A LOT of the questions I would have chosen both because I would do both in reality. Here’s my score:
The results said that if I score a 1 to 3 in any area I am fairly well balanced in those areas. I only scored 1’s and 3’s so I am balanced between the styles. I’m slightly more reflective, which makes sense because I like to research and study before starting an action. In regards to teaching, I try to allow for both in class as well. I want my students to have time to not just memorize the information, but to think of it and analyze it, see what the practical application is and then apply it accordingly. I also want my students to get a balance between sensing, or learning facts first, and intuition, where discovering the information.
To be honest, I’m still working on this. If I taught science it would be easier to set up experiments and see what happens. Hopefully, I can learn more activities to incorporate, such as these types of quizzes, to help me incorporate more intuition activities. I tend to introduce the course content and activities as repetition to help commit the information to memory, or give students the big picture facts and have them research the details. I do my best to incorporate both visual and verbal learning. I do this with the use of power-point presentations and group reading activities, as well as videos or having students hear something and then write it, or read something and then say it. I’m not sure of my response to the sequential/global section of the questionnaire. I organize my learning in cause and effect logic chains, not “absorbing material almost randomly without seeing connections, and then suddenly ‘getting it.’” I think that I got this result because I usually start big picture, go into details, and then return to the big picture. So far my students have preferred this because the big picture builds on what they learned last time. I usually start with the big picture being the Constitution. I go into the lesson at hand, presenting the main concept first and then dissecting it by going into all the nitty gritty details. I then take a step back to see how the details add up to the main concept. Then I finish by bringing the main concept back to the Constitution, because the Constitution organized our politics and laws in the United States.
