My Classroom Philosophy

In my eleventh grade year, I interned at a school for a few weeks in Newcastle Upon Tyne, England called the Walbottle School of First Choice, a secondary school that taught ages 12 (year 7) to 18 years old (year 13). Being in a school as big and different from what I had previously known not only shocked me culturally, but also opened my eyes to how varied learning could be. I remember 17-year-old me standing in front of their entire high school gathered in the main auditorium, explaining the ideas and culture of project based learning. I observed classrooms, interviewed students about their educational journey and thoughts, and worked with teachers closely. When I returned from my short international internship, I spent the rest of the internship period with a group of feisty kindergartners who were documenting their exploration and learning about a local watershed and its ecosystem. The experience was fundamental to forming my views of education today as I shared and collaborated with educators on how to better integrate project-based-learning ideas and values. After college, I was hired as an Academic Coach at High Tech Mesa and worked with twelfth graders in calculus for a school year. When I applied to SDTR, I wanted to separate myself from my high school alumni, and so I made the move to be placed in the Escondido schools, an opportunity to finally work in my hometown’s district. This move was transformative because I was able to observe and compare what teaching looked like outside of HTH to inside HTH. I think there are in fact several teaching philosophies that create an environment of collaboration and critical thinking that work in both districts. The philosophies and methods I use are heavily influenced by my experiences in these two different environments.

 

Because I am a math teacher with a degree in mathematics, I tend to see and apply these philosophies through the lens of a rigorous math classroom - sometimes stretching into the computer science applications. As such, I place a high value on habits of effective mathematicians: perseverance, forming conjectures and asking questions, making connections and collaborating mathematically, reasoning logically, and attending to detail. Ninth graders, however, don’t tend to naturally come to high school with these habits so how do we get students to the point where these habits do become natural for them to use in the classroom? This happens through first establishing and reflecting on students' relationships to math. For example, at the beginning of each semester, students in my classroom can anticipate working on Dear Math letters, where students will check-in with themselves about their feelings about math, their self-identified proficiencies, and their goals for themselves. I can imagine the difficulty some students may feel with math is that it feels external to themselves. For many students, math is something they are subjected to - something that happens to them and is forced upon them instead of an intellectual journey in which they are the captains of their own understanding and learning. The Dear Math letters are an attempt to disrupt that pattern of negative thinking, and serve as a starting place for students to form a positive relationship between math and themselves. When we start (or restart) from a solid, healthy foundation, we can more confidently build knowledge and understanding on top of it.

 

From there, I place a heavy emphasis in my classroom on student-led discussions and debriefs. “The person doing the talking is the person doing the learning,” is a motto I keep in mind when designing my classroom activities and tasks, inspired by research done by Cohen and Lotan. I am well-aware of the ability math has to glaze eyes over and send one’s mind into its mind palace, and so I purposefully try to make my activities engaging, well-timed, and personally relevant to students. This may mean giving math problems new contexts that speak to my kids, or providing different modalities that students can use to show understanding. Because my classroom is so heavily based on collaboration, I also make it a point to talk about emotional safety regarding sharing and discussing math. In an effort to model this for the students, I try not to hide my mistakes or cover them up from students - we all make mistakes and misunderstand, but what’s important is that the mistake can be identified and corrected. I have this same philosophy when it comes to students becoming well-adjusted, kind adults. The classroom is an environment to learn, and deep learning doesn’t happen without mistakes and failures.

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Lastly, I find mathematical literacy to be crucial for students to succeed in higher level math courses. As such, it’s important to me that literacy is prioritized in my classroom and lesson plans. Half the battle with math problems can be trying to figure out what the questions are even asking and what information is being given - when that hurdle is overcome, I find that mathematical confidence increases amongst students and leads to richer learning. Some strategies I use in my classroom involving literacy include breaking down vocabulary, contextualizing word problems, and jigsaw reading. Overall, my intentions for my classrooms and students is that students engage in rich mathematical discussions and work through problems with perseverance. I want to help my students establish themselves as mathematicians and lifelong learners of math, because those skills will let them grow and flourish both professionally and personally.