Vision for Educational Reflection

Vision for Educational Reflection In my opinion, the purposes of school for a society are to teach every student to be an analytical participant and to seek truth in the world around them. More so, through education, a student may learn to have love and ambition for oneself, to enable their pursuit of happiness, and to care for the world they will one day inherit. I plan to facilitate these sentiments in my classroom by including current events into the lectures whenever they tie in, and by showing my students that they as individuals are capable of developing their own informed perspective of the world around them. Reflective writings, classroom debates, and classroom survey activities are manageable ways to demonstrate every student’s uniqueness to the groups. I am sure that many teachers would say that their perfect ideal school environment would not have behavioural problems from students. But I would not want this, because it has been my experience that some students have no other way of communicating when they need help. Some students need the embarrassment and awkwardness of getting in trouble to understand the difference between appropriate and inappropriate behaviour. What I would consider a part of the ideal school environment is students coming to my class everyday motivated to learn. But I recognize that not every day will be wonderful for me or my students. Realistically, I will strive to make lessons interesting, activities thought-provoking, projects engaging, and make every student feel confident in themselves when they walk in on test days. I plan on improving my curriculum year after year, with student and faculty feedback. But I do recognize that different school administrations can pose unique challenges to curriculum building; as I have seen at Lincoln MS, where every lesson is required to be taught using gradual release methods. Various other unique challenges can come from the students themselves, obviously. Students who require different accommodations, who have IEP/504 Modifications, or who just have trouble focusing, have all the time in a perfect world to stay with me or a classroom aid to ensure that they are flourishing in my class. IEP and 504 Modifications are a classroom challenge that I wish I had been more prepared for in my Angelo State University College of Education studies. Since I began student teaching, I have discussed with several teachers about their management of necessary student accommodations. I have been able to find resources that help teachers organize modifications needed by different students, which I also believe would be a decent instructional tool for ASU’s education classes. The theories I learned in class about teaching students collided with real world experiences and complications this semester, which I am grateful to have experienced before being solely responsible for my own classroom. I learned theories about classroom management and about keeping students’ attention. But when I first got there I was not confident enough to assert myself as the authority figure, but I got much better over time. I believe that the cooperating teachers I was assigned to greatly impacted my behavior during the first few weeks, because I was taking cues from them on how they spoke to their students and what level of nonsense that they personally put up with from their students. From all of my experiences, my beliefs about the purpose of education in a society have been reaffirmed. There are so many ways for students to learn, and I believe that every student is capable of higher-level understanding. It is my responsibility as an educator to bring intrinsic and extrinsic motivations together with consistency, dedication, and warmth to inspire my students to become life-long learners.