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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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As an Art teacher, I am mostly traditional and process mastery but there is definitely room for me to observe what the students are enjoying the most and include a little more of those activities. I am a little more of a constructivist with my after school courses because they are smaller and more for their enjoyment and not built to accomplish certain lessons.
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I find my classroom has a mix of the three approaches. While some days appears to be teacher-centered in which I, or the curriculum, selects the content and I monitor students’ work; other days are student-centered in which the classroom is not especially quiet because students are collaborating. I often have students work in groups to develop a better understanding of content. Towards the end of my science unit, I provided students with the opportunity to choose a topic and develop an experiment, yet it was still teacher-monitored. I am working towards a more student-centered classroom in which the teacher is still the authority, but students are more active in the learning process.
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I don’t know that I see much difference between traditional and process mastery as defined by the last lesson but I am mostly one of them. I do regular science “experiments” that have specific step-by-step directions and then hope students get the proper results. Lab reports and presentations have set guidelines and each lesson comes with a set of goals to be reached and information to be garnered. This mostly works and most students tend to reach a level of mastery of the content within the required time. I would like to add in more inquiry-based lessons that allow the students to have the opportunity to be creative and inquisitive, allowing them to use the scientific process to answer their own questions.
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I think that my teaching has aspects of all these approaches. There are times when my lessons are very traditional in that all learning is teacher facilitated. My assessments and learning do revolve around whether a concept has been mastered. I do allow for some constructivist approaches such as centers, and hands-on-learning. I would like to incorporate more student driven assignments, and inquiry based lesson where the students are more active learners.
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I believe that I have a more traditional approach to teaching in my classroom, but there are many times where strategies from constructivism and process mastery are incorporated as well. One of the greatest benefits to the constructivist approach is a more active response to learning for the student through hands-on activities. One thing I would like to improve on is to add more variety and flexibility in assessment.
