In my position as a junior in a teacher education program, I feel that I still have a long way to go in the process of defining myself as an educator. Through this blog and the writings posted within it, I have made some of my earliest attempts to begin this process by exploring a number of vital questions, including what literacy is, how to effectively motivate students, and what results are to be desired from schools. In posting this final project for my Teacher Education 302 class, my goal is to discuss all of these themes in general and how they relate to the central question of who I am as a teacher.
Ultimately, the goal of any effective educator is to give each student something positive they can take away from the classroom, whether it be empirical knowledge, a problem-solving strategy, or knowledge of how the learning process works. As a teacher, I am hoping that students will be able to progress through my course and gain something from each of these categories of knowledge. However, each of these categories represents a different type of literacy, in that each is a different system of knowledge with different instructional methods and varying degrees of salience to different types of learners. This being the case, I feel it is necessary to determine which kind of literacy I would like to facilitate in my classroom. In his article about literacy, Tozer evaluates literacies in terms of whose interests are being served by the way it is defined. I would like to adopt this approach for my own purposes and start with the assumption that the interests I am trying to serve are those of the students.
This said, I would have to use what I know about students in order to begin my evaluation. From my experiences tutoring at Meadow Valley Middle School (pseudonym) in an urban school district, I know that any group of students will be diverse in their backgrounds, ability levels, and interests. If I am trying to serve diverse needs, I think that empirical knowledge as a literacy goal would not be in the best interests of my students because of the nature of much of the required curriculum of schools, which tends to be exclusive to certain cultural values. If all I want the students to take away is a certain set of knowledge, I will be promoting a very limited literacy. Promoting problem-solving strategies would probably meet the needs of the students more closely, but the problem with this approach to literacy is that not all students will use the same strategies. In some cultures, for example, it is the norm to use groups to problem-solve, and each student will have something that works the best for them. However, helping students recognize how the learning process works will give them the knowledge of how they learn the most efficiently and how to use those talents to reach their goals.
Therefore, if I perceive the goal of education to promote knowledge of the learning process, it will definitely affect the way I teach. I will essentially be asking students to make connections with what they already know, to find the problem solving methods that work for them, and to think about how to use this knowledge in other contexts. In this case, being an effective teacher will mean providing scaffolding for the students so they can gradually increase their skills in identifying what works for them. I will also have to provide a variety of assignments, projects, and activities to stimulate cognitive awareness of what the learning process means for each student. Ultimately, my role as a teacher will be the facilitator and supporter of an ongoing process that will help students gain competency in the literacy of learning.
Having identified this type of literacy as one of the main goals of my instruction, I need to consider how to have students become engaged in the same goals. This is where the issue of motivation comes in, and once again I need to ask myself what I know about students. I know that students are sometimes being pulled in several directions with the different demands on their time, and for this reason they may not have that much energy or motivation to devote to a single class. I can also anticipate that students may not have a high self-efficacy for new tasks, and the process of discovering their own learning styles could very well be a new concept for many students. If I want to be an effective teacher, there are several things I will need to do in order to motivate the students in my classroom. When dealing with the issue of motivation in general, it would probably be effective for the students to realize that what they are learning can be generalized to other things they are involved in, whether it be their other classes or their hobbies and extracurricular activities. If students know they can improve in other areas by monitoring their own learning processes in those contexts as well as in the classroom, they will have achieved one of the important goals of cognitive awareness about learning as well as gaining motivation. Being an effective teacher will also mean motivating students to take part in different types of activities that promote problem solving, so I should also provide engaging activities that will help students learn about themselves and how they deal with finding solutions to problems or tasks.
When dealing with low self-efficacy, I would draw on the work of Brophy and say that the most important methods to teach the students would be proximal goal setting and periodic self-evaluation. Since exploring how the learning process works is a process in itself, it would be important to set small goals at first so that students do not feel that they need to come to an understanding about how they learn all at once. Rather, they should have the opportunity to begin with a few short-term goals that will help them start the process of evaluating how they are learning. I think that this is an especially important motivation strategy because it can be effective for students with varying degrees of self-efficacy, since everyone can benefit from a series of small successes. After students can realize successes, they are usually more likely to be motivated to try more and experiment with what they are doing, namely, learning how they learn best. Periodic self-evaluation can also be motivating for diverse learners because it emphasizes progress monitoring, and making progress is an important intrinsic motivator. If a student realizes that they have made progress in recognizing part of their effective learning process, such as how they best approach a particularly difficult task, their motivation will probably get a boost. Of course, these are general strategies that would have to be tailored to the needs of the individuals in the classroom, so part of being an effective teacher will also mean identifying these needs and modifying my strategies. In this way, I become a researcher of motivation methods and their effectiveness so that I may assist my students in ways that pertain to their particular experiences, learning styles, and goals.
Up to this point, I have been discussing what I would like to have happen in my classroom. However, as I indicated previously, there is also the question of what we should be expecting from schools. My perspective of the classroom as a place for students to become aware of their own learning processes affects how I teach, and in the same way different perspectives on the place of the school system in our society will affect which results people think we should be getting from schools. According to David F. Labaree, schools have been subject to the conflicting demands of producing citizens, training workers, and preparing students for a competitive society. As a teacher, I reject all of these goals, as they are all too narrow and restrictive to what schools can accomplish. This is because some of these goals teach students that they are nothing but individual islands, standing alone as they make their way in the world, and others teach that the purpose of each person is to fit into their needed position in the greater community. Students should have the chance to explore both parts of their existence, as individuals with potential and talent and as members of communities. Therefore, what we want from schools should be opportunities to let students do this exploring. As a teacher, I am prepared to advocate for those opportunities if it means a change in how things are organized or the addition of programs. Of course, I realize that schools have become socializing agents and may always remain so, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t expect more from our system of education and look for opportunities to change it for the better.
Thus far, I have identified myself as a facilitator, a supporter, a researcher, and an advocate. Thinking about myself as a teacher from the perspective of a few central questions has brought me to these conclusions. However, through reading articles and observing other teachers in general, I believe there are still many questions related to my identity as an educator that I will have to explore as I continue to ask, who am I as a teacher? At times, teachers take on the roles of advocates for students, mentors, politicians, and representatives of the school according to the situations they encounter, and I think that as I begin my career as an educator I will have to make decisions about how I fill these roles. There are also the issues presented by Ornstein and Levine in their discussion of educational philosophies, including the questions of what theories we use to guide our educational practice and how our philosophies will affect the learning of our students. Fortunately, through the topics I have discussed in this paper, my tutoring experiences, and the discussions in my teacher education class, I have been able to answer a fundamental set of questions that will guide me in making future decisions about what roles to assume as a teacher.
Works Cited
Brophy, J. (2004). Supporting students’ confidence as learners. In Motivating students to learn (2nd ed., pp. 55-86). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Labaree, D. F. (1997). Public goods, private goods: The American struggle over educational goals. American Educational Research Journal, 34, 39-81.
Ornstein, A. C., & Levine, D. U. (2000). Philosophical roots of education. In Foundations of education (7th ed., pp. 388-420). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Tozer, S. E., & Willis, A. I. (1995). Liberty and literacy today: Contemporary perspectives. In S. E. Tozer, P. C. Violas & G. B. Senese (Eds.), School and society: Historical and contemporary perspectives (2nd ed., pp. 247-264). New York: McGraw-Hill.
