My teaching philosophy has been greatly influenced by John Dewey. John Dewey believed that the best way to learn anything was to do it. This is something that I find to be very effective in a math classroom. Through out my time as a student teach as well as my time as a students myself, I have found that students do not learn anything if the teacher does everything for them. Of course students are still going to need examples before doing the work alone, but only doing examples as a class, and not allowing students to try to figure it out on their own is not an effective way to teach. Making mistakes and learning from them is absolutely essential in math classrooms. If students do not learn to solve the problem on their own and make mistakes in the process, then what did they learn?
How Children Succeed by Paul Tough has also had a lot of influence on the development of my teaching philosophy. A lot of teachers struggle to get students to be engaged in their classwork and assume it is because they are lazy or unmotivated to do better. However, the solution is actually quite simple. Many times students are not engaged because they do not feel like the content they are learning is relevant to them or they feel like it does not matter and that they will never need it later in life. The simple solution to this issue is to do whatever it takes to make the content relevant to your students. I always try to use an interest survey at the beginning of my student teaching so that I can get an idea of what the students like and what they find important. I then use what the students have told me to create problems using scenarios relevant to the students. For example, if I know that the majority of the students are football fans, I would ask what percentage is equivalent to 30 yards on a football field if there are 100 yards total. It is not a difficult problem to solve and it shows the students that math is everywhere in the real world, we just do not always see it at first.
How Children Succeed by Paul Tough has also had a lot of influence on the development of my teaching philosophy. A lot of teachers struggle to get students to be engaged in their classwork and assume it is because they are lazy or unmotivated to do better. However, the solution is actually quite simple. Many times students are not engaged because they do not feel like the content they are learning is relevant to them or they feel like it does not matter and that they will never need it later in life. The simple solution to this issue is to do whatever it takes to make the content relevant to your students. I always try to use an interest survey at the beginning of my student teaching so that I can get an idea of what the students like and what they find important. I then use what the students have told me to create problems using scenarios relevant to the students. For example, if I know that the majority of the students are football fans, I would ask what percentage is equivalent to 30 yards on a football field if there are 100 yards total. It is not a difficult problem to solve and it shows the students that math is everywhere in the real world, we just do not always see it at first.