Guiding Question: What is the role of a teacher in a secondary learning-centered environment?
In a word, I would say that the purpose of a teacher is to be a guide. You are quite literally guiding students through their year(s) in your classroom. You have all the necessary tools and research to back them up and push them to explore the world around them. The real trick is that as a guide, you are pushing them to take an interest. You have to be careful that you don’t over push to the point of teenage rebellion, or that you don’t under push – to the point of boredom.You have to make an effort to understand your students and to know where those lines are.
We’ve all been through high school, and we’ve all had varying experiences in doing so. We all value education and different methods of being taught differently. There are some things we agree on – motivated, engaged students are more likely to learn, and there are certain styles of teaching that lend themselves immediately to motivating and engaging students. We all had that teacher who stands out to us because we knew where we stood in their – at the time – seemingly unconventional classroom.
Now we’ve had a chance to take our first dip into being on the other side of that classroom. We did research on teaching methods, on where our students might be at, where we can get them to, methods to get them there. We learned to make sure we were experts in the subject matter we were teaching our students. We built lesson plans and we executed them, inserting them into another teacher’s curriculum.
Being an expert is really important. When I was in high school, I went to a school that was full of kids who would eat you alive if you didn’t know everything you could know back-to-front. Students often thought it was a game to outsmart their teachers, ask questions beyond the purview of any given lesson. The teachers who planned lessons straight from the textbook without any further research were crucified in the hallways. The teachers who offered choice, exploration, and a high level of academic rigor were some of the most highly regarded teachers in the school.
All of this has come together to show me just how important it is to find new ways – beyond lecture – to teach history. To find ways to make history real and relatable. To tie in current events to what has happened in the past because it is all still current in one way or another. When I was able to test out engaging activities, they worked really well. Keeping the students in mind as equals, and evaluating them based on what they can do works both in your own favor and in the students favor.
Using backward design to create the most engaging lessons possible gave me an organized and thorough way to put together everything for a single lesson, and to show what parts of the lesson plan would be reached in further lessons out. Having such a tool at my disposal with the research to back up both the lesson plan and the instructional and assessment strategies. I also was able to look into other methods of grading and assigning grades that were really interesting and gave students a shot at working within their strengths.