Day 12: How do you envision your teaching changing over the next five years?
In the next five years, I hope my teaching changes in two significant ways.
1. Less time teaching
Yes. I said it. Now, don't get me wrong. I love my time with my students, but there are times when the workload of prepping, teaching, and grading for six classes of 160+ students is unbelievable. Most of the prep and grading has to be done outside of regular school hours. I usually come to school an hour before and leave two hours later than I am required to be there. I don't mind hard work, but this is not a job you can do well when you are exhausted. The demands of the job will try your patience when you are well-rested, but when you are tired it can be downright brutal. I envision teaching four classes and using the other two hours a day to plan, grade, and collaborate with colleagues. I also would love to have time built into my days to conference one-on-one with my high school students and their parents. It would be great if I could observe my colleagues so I could learn new techniques, activities, and strategies.
2. More Student-Led Learning
Some teachers call this project-based learning. I call it a necessity for our students. Unfortunately, our students have every moment of their lives scheduled in and out of school. There is far less creative, free-play for them. At the high school level, there is even less. Last year I experimented with
Genius Hour and saw that my students needed the freedom to learn, grow, and create. Many of them struggled, at first, with the unstructured time, but eventually they began to create amazing projects. They created stuff that I couldn't have begun to imagine. The skills they learned went beyond content knowledge. They learned time management, perseverance, problem solving, and working within a group. These are all important skills that will transfer to any class or job they may encounter in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment