Educ 513 Philosophy Of Teaching

Here is a link to the audio recording of my speech, and below is my Power Point. Many thanks to Amanda for teaching me how!

http://www.divshare.com/download/7714809-c47
Educ 513 Philosophy Of Teaching

View more OpenOffice presentations from areininga.

Ausio for my speech

This is the audio to my speech "The Whole Child"! Please see slideshow below to follow along with the audio.

thanks,
lisa

Great Resource if You Haven't Visited Yet: epals

I was exploring ways to engage with other classrooms outside of the standard blog/Skype experiences. One of the websites recommended by 21stcenturyschoolteacher.com was epals. I have been impressed, though I have not actually engaged in a collaborative project as of yet. As a teacher, you submit a profile. After it is approved, you can begin to seek out collaborative partnerships with other classrooms or you can submit your own proposal for a project. Within already created projects, you can search by topics, country, age and language. There are also a variety of forums presented by the site (some helpful, some not). Another feature I appreciated was the ease in which parents could participate/access the material. The parents of my students love to be involved but many of them have limited access and knowledge to computers. Attempting to explain blogs and involving them on Skype would have been difficult. This website, I found, was much easier to explain to them and get them involved in. If you haven't visited it yet, I recommend browsing to see if it would be a technology helpful to you.

http://www.epals.com

SocialStudies Speech- L.Berenholz

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

SocialStudies Speech- L.Berenholz

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Philosophy of Teaching Speech (and tips)

Hello!
Below is my speech! I am so glad that I was able to make this actually work! It was a community effort, so thank you Jessica and the Bank Street Help Desk.

Here is what I did--it looks complicated, but it wasn't.

1. Download Audacity--http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
this is really quick and easy. I don't like downloading things, but this was great.

2. Record yourself in audacity--this was easy, you just click the red, round record button and speak! The harder part was how to edit, but you can figure it out. You can highlight the track and press delete, or the "cut" button.

File type--Audacity has it's own type of file, so you need to EXPORT the file as a .wav or .mp3. With all my struggles, I found that exporting it as .mp3 was my best bet.

3. Download Lame Library - http://lame.buanzo.com.ar/
You need to download this in order to Export the file as an .mp3
Save it to your desktop so that it is easy to find.

Audacity - go to FILE > Export as mp3

4. Then I uploaded my mp3 file (my speech) into the website http://www.divshare.com/
and linked the file to this post!

Please click here to hear my Philosophy of Teaching Speech.
Please click here to view my Powerpoint Presentation.

Philosophic Speech and how I sent it as a .m4a

Please see my speech below. I recorded it on Garage Band. To convert it to a .m4a I clicked on share and then on import to disk...then it just converts the file that you have already saved in garage band in to an emailable format.

P.S. I had no idea how to do this and went to the help desk at bank street to learn how, they were very helpful and nice and talked me through it while i took notes. If you have questions, please ask me and I'll do my best to help you out, or just go to the computer help desk.

My own perspective is that all students deserve a learning environment which, while holding them equally accountable for learning the material, respects the different ways in which their inevitably varying perspectives will contribute to and enrich the learning experience of fellow classmates. As Dewey points out, “the child can carry over what he learns in the home and utilize it in the school; and the things learned in the school he applies at home” (Dewey, 1990, p. 80). Therefore a classroom that accommodates children from different backgrounds and learning styles would benefit students by providing them with learning material from homes other than their own and ideas different from ones that they are growing up with. Until fairly recently, assimilation, or pressure on children to cast off their racial and cultural individuality and learning preferences in order to adapt to the school environment, was viewed positively by many.

Children who have different learning styles, including students with special needs, can bring much added value to a classroom by providing their peers with a varying perspective on material that they are learning. Including children from different backgrounds and with different learning styles in mainstream classrooms will serve to make the first step towards helping us as teachers to “bridge the gap between school and society and play some part in the fashioning of those great common purposes which should bind the two together” (Counts, 1959, p. 28). In the adult world we encounter many different types of people and the classroom should emulate that real life scenario as closely as possible.

Another important way in which teachers can help to support their diverse classrooms once they are established, is to set up a learning environment that is conducive to the needs of all types of students. Perhaps the most basic level of the classroom that needs to be set up is the rules and regulations that are in place to make it a safe and stress free environment for everyone. In Erikson’s Eight Stages of Man, he outlines the consequences of lording rules over children without giving them any insight into the meaning behind them. He addresses parents in his writing, cautioning them that they, “must not only have certain was of guiding by prohibition and permission; they must also be able to represent to the child, an almost somatic conviction that there is a meaning to what they are doing” (Erikson p. 222). These words are meaningful for teachers as well because seemingly meaningless rules imposed on children in a classroom could also bring about the same type of frustration that can lead, as Erikson mentions, to neurotic behavior.

As discussed by Kessler who addresses the politics of play, when the teacher in a classroom made “a conscious decision…not to impose their views on the children’s self-expression and knowledge construction, the children themselves were quite active in their attempts to influence each other and take control of particular situations”(Kessler p. 66). A striking result of this tactic was a boy who instructed a classmate to pick up an item that had fallen off the table as if he “were filling a kind of void left by the teachers’ purposeful relinquishing of authority” (Kessler p. 67). Evidently, children are able to imitate and internalize certain community regulating modes of behavior when left to their own devices.

As stated by Vygotsky who discusses the zone of proximal development “Studies are proving new insights into the ways in which adults gradually shift the responsibility for solving a problem from themselves to the child, how adults monitor the child’s interest and enthusiasm, and other details of the teaching process” (Crain 215). Therefore, providing useful tools and a productive environment are ways that teachers can urge children to learn. Adults do not hand down learning to children, but instead they learn through their own interactions with the environment around them. As discussed by Piaget, “development is an active construction process, in which children, through their own activities, build increasingly differentiated and comprehensive cognitive structures” (Crain p.103). The cognitive and emotional leaps made by children with special needs as they navigate the social and academic rules of a classroom can be supported through his or her teacher’s careful construction of a community.

References

Counts, G. 1932/1959. Dare the School Build a New Social Order? Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Crain, W. (1992). Ch. 6 Piaget’s cognitive-development theory, In Theories of Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice hall, pp.100-233

Crain, W. (1992). Ch. 10 Vygotsky’s social-historical theory of cognitive development, In Theories of Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice hall, pp.193-221

Dewey, J. 1900, 1915, 1990. The School and Society/The Child and the Curriculum. Chicago:U. of Chicago Press.

Erikson, E. (1963). Childhood and Society. (2nd ed.). New York: W.W. Norton. Chapter 7, Eight stages of man.

Kessler, S.A., & Hauser, M. (2000) Critical pedagogy and the politics of play. In L.D. Soto, (Ed.) The Politics of Early Childhood Education. (pp.59-71) N.Y.:Peter Long.