Educational Philosophy/Model Integration

One of the most important things I do in my classrooms is to keep the students engaged in meaningful academic learning. As we all know this is a major key in their learning. After seeing all of the demonstrations that were done I was truly amazed at how wonderful some of the presentations were. I can see myself using all of the models at some point in my teaching. However, the two that stood out to me were the inductive thinking and and the role playing.


ROLE PLAYING
As a social science teacher the role playing model fits like a glove. It goes without saying the role playing is a great way to get students actively participating in the learning process, because they become the learning process; they are the props and the lesson. I also feel that role playing touches on so many of the important aspects of learning. It can teach language acquisition, content, empathy and to see other perspectives. As important as language and content related learning are I feel that empathy and the ability to not just see the other side of the coin but to appreciate the view from there is equally important in the development of our students as we move deeper into the new century. By having students role play and take a role that may not conform to their current perspective or mindset can really impact them and the way that they view that subject or people while also teaching the important concepts and knowledge that are needed to be successful in the academic arena.


INDUCTIVE THINKING
Inductive thinking is another model that I feel fits well into the social science arena in that it forces students to use a higher level of thinking to come to the proper conclusions about what can at first look like a random set information. It forces students to gather data and organize it in a creative manner. This idea fits my philosophy of allowing the students to use their cognitive strengths to come up with plausible and defend-able positions related to the course work.  I feel that when students learn to their strengths they retain the information in a much more concrete manner. This model also invites a large amount of dialogue and given the fact that I am not to chatty (joke) my favorite lessons to teach involve a lot of dialouge between the students in which I can interject to either deepen the concept or correct misconceptions or simply point the students in a different direction to get them back on track. In using this model I can see myself setting up groups with different outcomes on the same idea and then having them compare and contrast the outcomes.