Chapter 7: Thinking about Teaching and Learning

• The first thing I might add to my teaching philosophy when it comes time to rewrite it is to implement a teaching style like Hilda Taba's. I would diagnose the needs of the classroom. This does not just concern supplies and what we will need to teach certain subjects, but the needs of the children. What do my students need to accomplish by the end of the year? Then I would work on making goals/objectives for the students and myself included. So that we can all succeed and learn and have a plan to go by for the rest of the year. Then, according to what my students need to learn I will select some curriculum to teach them, and organize it according to levels individual students need, and preference. After I implement the curriculum I have picked out based on what my students need, I will access how well they are learning from it. If their learning is not satisfactory I will try a new method. If they are all succeeding then we can further test their compacity for retaining that knowledge. Evaluating their knowledge retaining skills, and giving tests with similar material that has already been taught, and also including new learning material in the tests as well.
• I would also include the Discovery Method. This method was made by Jerome Bruner. It teaches thinking skills necessary to the development of problem-solving abilities. I have noticed this first hand with my precalculus teacher Lori Koban. In past math classes in high school I was simply taught the formula's to get specific answers. Whereas in Dr. Koban's class she does not teach us just the formula's. She starts out with how to get the formula's and asks us questions of what we would do. Not just giving us all the answer, but making us think criitcally about the right answer. Her class is not done by the book, or by each specific formula. We are truly learning pre calculus and will be able to understand how we got to this specific formula and why we use it for this specific thing.
• Another thing I would include in my philosophy is Metaphysis. Some teachers would put the subject matter they were teaching ahead of the childs needs and individual learning style. I think that the child is more important than any specific subject matter. Instead of focusing solely on subject matter I will focus more on the child, and when the child learns well being taught a specific way. 
• One more thing I would add would be to collaborate with teachers, especially ones who have been teaching for a long time. They know what works and what doesn't in a specific school. Getting basic information on what works (teaching methods) and trying it out in my own classroom to see if it works, will give me a head start on how to improve on teaching methods. Change is not a bad thing for education What is difficult is letting go of the no-longer-useful ideas(Joy of Teaching, 273)