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How would you currently describe your overall approach to teaching in your classroom: traditional, process mastery, or constructivist? What works well in your approach? What needs improvement?
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I would say my classroom is mostly process mastery with some influence of constructivist. The process mastery portion is the traditional educational process we undergo, helping students understand key concepts and ideas. We then apply these through a series of different assessments (tests, quizzes, etc). The constructivist portion comes from our course discussion. I teach Bible, so many times students will have questions unrelated to our topic at the time. When that happens, we divert so that we can address student questions. Especially in Bible, these are some of the most vital conversations we can have.
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Read aloud app. This is a way of getting them to read and comprehend what they are reading. We have tigers and lambs. Lambs are patient and like asking questions. Need to really hear what they are saying. Tigers on the other hand are expressive. Pointing out things can balance learning with research and stepping out of the comfort zone can bring on growth in learning. Like learning time brings reward. Maybe free time to through bean bags, taking walk outside with a notebook, their own journal. Like taking a pinecone and taking putting it in water and dry it. Have them put the pinecone closed up on a paper towel leave there to the next day. Then the next day they show up and see that the pinecone is opened up again. This is how forgiveness works. There is always room for improvement in teaching and learning. The secret behind teaching is learning.
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I’m probably more of the traditional approach. I do implement elements of process/mastery approach. I don’t subscribe to the constructivist approach but do believe that flexibility is important to meet the need of the student. I could do a better job with providing more learning centers that meek individual student needs.
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As a language teacher, I would say that my approach is more process mastery. There is a certain way to teach a language as a foreign language and not a second language that requires learning some foundational elements before trying to learn more advanced elements. I do try to offer differentiation in the way students can show me that they have mastered content that allows them to take part in some decision making on how they are learning the content.
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Maybe I am a little bit of everything… Some things in life have to be specific and traditional. I also have to meet certain standards and see where my students master it. I also give them projects where they have choices to write or type, draw on paper or online, etc.