Analytical Reflections
In order for a teacher to truly impact his or her students’ lives, he must employ many various tactics, strategies, and methods of teaching. Students’ needs are far greater than any single technique or approach can meet. Teachers must include patience, responsibility, autonomy, cooperation, and encouragement into their lessons. Throughout my observations during the past semester, I have come to realize the importance and difficulty of incorporating the many beneficial teaching methods with the State standard requirements.
Mr. T. succeeds at employing motivational methods for his students; he encourages the students to begin and complete the assignments. He uses extrinsic motivation during the vocabulary tests by offering extra credit for identification of a different form of the vocabulary word and the new form’s part of speech. The desire for a better grade will motivate the students to dig deep in their minds and utilize their knowledge of adding prefixes and suffixes to words. The students can choose to utilize this extra credit or not; but the allure of an increase in grade persuades many of the students make the attempt to answer these bonus questions. Motivation was shown as the students were leaving the room once the class had ended; one student asked Mr. T. when they were going to get their pizza. Mr. T. told him “on Friday”. Mr. T. then informed me that he told the students he would give them a pizza party if they raised $500 for a charity fundraiser. Although it is unsafe to assume to students only raised the money in order to have the pizza party, Mr. T. offered extrinsic motivation which most likely added to the students’ intrinsic motivation to help others in need and resulted in over $500 raised for charity. The students choose to raise the money because they had the inner desire to help others and they would also benefit by receiving a pizza party. Mr. T. also encourages student motivation by connecting historical events, quotes, and beliefs to the students’ lives. He presented his students with the quote by Dwight D. Eisenhower “What really counts is not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.” He went on to set up the basics of WWII, the seemingly unbeatable odds of defeating the large German army, and the role Eisenhower played in the war. He then asked the students how they could “apply this drive to [their] life, to school.” He explained that “it’s not how smart you are, but how willing you are to work and learn.” This emphasis on effort as opposed to ability is encouraging to students who may have developed the inaccurate belief that they are destined to failure.
The extrinsic and intrinsic motivation provided by M. T. will help the students. These two forms of motivation combine to enhance learning (Woolfolk 352). The students benefit from this positive motivation because they will choose to perform the assignment, they will put forth the necessary effort, and they will feel compelled to persist in completing the work (Woolfolk 350). Providing extra credit encourages the students to answer the questions using their knowledge or to seek to attain the knowledge needed to answer the questions in the future (Woolfolk 353). The pizza party was the continuous goal motivating the students to raise the money for charity, while the Eisenhower quote was introduced with a moving depiction of war that was then related to the students’ tribulations of urban and school. The balance between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation ensures the students will always want to do their assignments (Woolfolk 352). When students are motivated, they will retain the information in their long term memory and the knowledge will easily transfer to outside situations. Motivation is also closely tied to self-esteem as students who are engaged in a lesson or feel personally related to a task are more likely to feel better about themselves when they succeed.
Mr. T. fails to promote cooperative learning, where students work together in small groups providing each other with support, encouragement, and feedback while still being evaluated on their own knowledge attainment. Mr. T only utilizes entire class discussion which, although helpful, does not provide detailed attention to any one student’s ideas or feelings. The Eisenhower quote, a passage and questions concerning the Alamo, and the literary terms used in a novel are inspected and analyzed by the whole class together. This prevents wrong answers from being appropriately addressed. As the class reviewed the answers to the Alamo passage, one student gave answer that was incorrect. Mr. T. merely said “No” and had another student give the correct answer. The student with the incorrect answer was never asked why he found the answer he did nor was he explained the reason for the correct one. Mr. T. also had the students write in their journals in response to the Eisenhower quote and then had one student read her response to the class. Mr. T.’s only reply was “Nice” and then he moved the direction of the class to the next assignment. She did not receive adequate or strongly encouraging feedback, nor was her grammar, punctuation, or elaboration evaluated as it would have been if the students worked in groups to evaluate and discuss their work with a few of their peers.
Mr. T.’s lack of encouraging cooperative learning in his classroom will harm the students’ education, social skills, and abilities in the future. Lack of cooperative learning has proven to negatively affect students’ attitudes towards others, increase students’ anxiety and frustration with school, create a sense of separation from others, and increases fierce academic competition among students (Woolfolk 492). Omission of cooperative learning also damages students’ ability to critically think and analyze problems, while keeping learning stagnant (Woolfolk 493). This leads to unexpanded schemas since students are prevented from thorough investigation and explanation of new information.
Mr. T. does allow his students to make choices about their actions and control their success, thus he is good at promoting self-determination in his students. For the vocabulary tests, the students have to appropriately use each vocabulary word in an original sentence. This allows the students to choose how to best express their knowledge of the word. The students are responsible for creating a correct answer as opposed to being forced to recite exactly what they have been told the answer is. For an assessment test, the students had to read two short stories and write an essay about the stories’ recurring theme. This test creates many opportunities for the students to make important decisions about their work. As stories contain numerous themes, the students can choose from a wide variety of choices, allowing them to write about something personally important or relevant to the students’ lives. They also have control over what they use as their supporting evidence. Mr. T. told the students they could use “direct quotes or paraphrased ideas,” “anything that supports your claim.” Students are also given the opportunity to make choices in their journal entries. They had to respond to the quote by Eisenhower, but could respond in many different ways. For topics, Mr. T. offered “What do you think he meant by this quote?,” “How can you apply this to your life?,” and “How does attitude affect your performance?” The students were not limited to one topic and they had enough leeway to address what was important to them.
Mr. T.’s attention to providing his students with self-determining situations is beneficial to the students’ emotional development and success in school. Anita Woolfolk asserts that Mr. T.’s classroom structure will grasp students’ attention and persuade them to use their creativity to produce high quality work (Woolfolk 371). Students are likely to enjoy learning new and challenging skills as they find pride and satisfaction in their success (371). As students’ hold more control over their work, their sense of competence and self-efficacy will increase (371). Self-control of school work will also positively affect students’ self-esteem as they come to realize their full abilities. As students make choices based on ideas they feel passionate about or interested in, their ability to transfer the new information into various situations will be strengthened.
It is clear that no single approach to teaching is the best way to benefit students. Variety, discipline, and praise are just a few of the things teachers must consider when planning lessons and guiding a class. Teachers need to strike a balance between relaying the knowledge onto the students’ and allowing them to develop skills on their own. Mr. T. has proven to be capable of helping his students to strengthen their abilities but he could better assist their critical thinking and communication skills by allowing more student to student interaction and learning.