I teach to change the world through education. My mission is to create a better world outlook for my students when they leave my classroom then when they first arrived and in an environment in which students can realize their full potential. My teaching revolves around students and how to foster their holistic development. This holistic development will stem through actively incorporating and practicing skills that transcend the classroom. These skills include character, respect, critical thinking, perseverance, responsibility, problem solving, creativity, and resilience, among others. My hope is that students will leave my classroom and have the ability and confidence to become the best they can be as people, friends, employees, leaders, and citizens. Many adolescent students long for a positive male role model and someone who believes in them and advocates for them, and I will be that person who makes a difference in students' lives.
One aspect I love about Social Studies is that there are many ways to engage students and bring meaning to the subject. Although Social Studies often focuses on the past, it can be brought to life by engaging students and displaying the impact this vast discipline has on society. Students can actively learn and explore into the content with concrete materials and abstract thinking. Manipulatives and primary sources are a great way to bring the past to life. Student choice is also important in helping students learn Social Studies. Learning does not have to be static. Rather, I firmly believe that students can make learning useful and meaningful to them by incorporating personal interests into their learning. In order to accomplish this form of active learning, I am a proponent of Carol Ann Tomlinson's watershed work on differentiated instruction. Students do not all learn the same, and they each have individual needs. As a teacher, it is my responsibility to learn my students' strengths and incorporate those strengths into instruction to maximize their learning (while incorporating aspects in which students need to improve). In my classroom, every student's voice matters, and instruction will be tailored to have students become active learners. It is important to note that during classroom discussions and debates in which students disagree, there will be a positive classroom rapport already built since the first day (by individually getting to know students and investing in them) in which the classroom environment allows for respectful disagreements and coming to compromises. When preparing units and the scope of the classroom curriculum, a personal favorite method of designing and organizing educational curriculum is backwards design (especially Understanding by Design). This method aids me in setting goals and deciding what are the essential "take aways" for students to learn by the end of the unit in accordance with the state standards. It is from these goals and themes will I then determine as the appropriate evidence of in understanding and achieving the desired results through assessments. Only at the end of the teacher preparation process will I specifically design lessons to help students learn the knowledge and skills that enables them to apply their learning in meaningful ways that they will remember and take away for years to come.