Teaching ~ Fire Fighter Style

Teach Thought 30 Day Blogging Challenge ~ Day 29 ~ How have I changed as an educator since I first started teaching?

 

How have I changed?

Clear learning goals and targets to get those goals, and teaching in digestible chunks.

By deconstructing learning goals I now am able to create leveled learning targets to help more students achieve the learning goal.

By teaching these learning targets I force myself to teach in digestible chunks. Because of my love and excitement for learning and discovering new knowledge I tend to “teach everything all at once”.

Although my students have always loved the excitement and fun of my classroom, they sometimes came away feeling overwhelmed and incapable of achieving the learning goals.

Some parents even pulled their kids from my class saying they, “weren’t smart enough to learn the way I taught”, which told me something was missing from my teaching, something important.

Like a firefighter whose job it is to put out every fire, my job as a teacher is to reach and teach every student.

Firefighters don’t hope to put out a fire. They use all of their intelligence and courage to do their best to put out every one.

I’ve had to find the courage to increase my teaching intelligence in order to make improvements in my teaching.

Deconstructing learning goals into achievable steps, and monitoring myself to teach in those steps, has made big improvements towards my fire-fighting teaching style of putting out the fires of doubt in my students and helping them all achieve the learning goals, step-by-step.

Thank you, Dr. Marzano for your research into the areas of effective teaching practices, and to my principal, Mary Hool, for implementing those practices in our school.