What Teaching Has Looked Like for Me

 In class, we touched upon the diversity of teaching experiences and the idea that the teaching profession is constantly changing, and this really resonated with me. It reminded me that although I am only now pursuing a bachelors of education degree, I have been collecting teaching experiences in various forms along my way here. I think this is really important for me and other teacher candidates to make use of; we all have experiences in a classroom as a student, and experiences outside of the classroom that can also inform our teaching, such as work experiences and volunteering experiences, among others. 

 I’ll be writing about some of my own experiences that I can connect to teaching, in hopes that others find them relatable or helpful in relation to their own experiences and teaching philosophy. 

 As a kid, I played baseball for many years and as a result, I got into umpiring as a job when I was pretty young (14). It was a really eye opening experience for me because it was one of the first times where understanding something I had learned was different than putting it into real world practice. I already knew the rules of baseball, but I knew them from the eyes of a player, not an official. Stepping onto the field as an umpire was a totally different experience, even though the rules were all the same. I played a different role, people depended on me, it was a job I was being paid to do. I think this is very much relevant to me now, because I think stepping into the classroom as a teacher for the first time will feel much the same for me. Even though I've spent so many years in a classroom, being there as a teacher will be very different from being there as a student, and I think that is important to recognize. As a teacher, I will be more professional, more of a role model for students, and students will depend on me more. Just as I experienced umpiring, I think that teaching will prove a very new and fresh, but informed, experience for me, despite the familiar setting.

A few years ago, I quit umpiring as my summer job and became a zookeeper! Of course I spent a lot of time looking after the animals there, feeding them, cleaning enclosures, and checking on their health, but I also spent a lot of time with guests, teaching them about the animals and answering questions they had about them. This was one of my first real teaching experiences, albeit an unconventional one. Something very important I learned there is that everyone is at their own stage in their learning, and as an educator you should meet them where they are at to teach them as best as you can. For example, some children would come to the zoo with their parents and they would know more about the animals than their parents would. It was vital for me to get a feel for the level of knowledge that each guest had, so that I wasn’t wasting their time with facts they already knew or giving an elaborate explanation they wouldn’t understand. To me, there were no silly questions; I wanted everyone to be comfortable asking questions they had, no matter where they were at with their understanding. This is the kind of environment I want to bring to the classroom. I think students should feel safe asking questions, even if other students may already know the answer. I want to be an adaptable teacher and help each student along their educational journey - which will look different for everyone - no matter their current level of understanding. 

The last experience I want to talk about is the most recent one. After my zookeeper era, I began tutoring students in math, with ages ranging from pre-K to grade 12. (Math is actually not one of my teachables, but I did take math courses up to and during my second year of university, so I have a fair amount of experience in math.) This is the closest experience I have had to classroom teaching, and the one that I think will transfer skills the most directly. It gave me some practice with educational skills like individualized lesson planning, direct verbal instruction, and providing feedback on student work. However, the skill that I found most important from this tutoring experience was a method called Socratic questioning. Before tutoring, I had never heard this term, but the idea is to guide students to an answer by asking thoughtful questions that draw on what they already know to arrive at a solution to a new problem. For example, when a student is stuck on a problem, a question like “What do you know about XYZ?” may prompt them to answer the problem themselves, before they even realize it. The key is that as an educator, I did not provide them any information, I only guided their way of thinking using their own knowledge. In my experience, this can be very rewarding and confidence-building for a student, because I am not telling them what the answer is, they are finding it themselves, with their own knowledge. This is a practice that I plan to incorporate into my classroom teaching as a teacher as well. I think that sometimes, asking thoughtful questions to guide student thinking rather than just explaining a concept directly is so much more valuable and rewarding for students’ learning. 

 

Hopefully you, the reader, have found some of this useful for your own teaching practice. I tried to incorporate a mix of my own feelings, some teaching practices, and different ways to approach education. I want to make clear that there is no cookie cutter model to be a teacher, and there shouldn’t be! As educators, we should share helpful ideas and practices with each other, because we all come from a huge variety of different backgrounds and bring different valuable experiences to the table!

JacobL@OTU