Building An Educational Philosophy

1. Building An Educational Philosophy Chapter 11

2. Teacher-Centered Authority • Classroom organization: rigid/fixed, highly organized from furniture to lessons • Motivation: external controls • Discipline: high teacher control • Classroom climate: nurturing teacher voice; community of on-task learners • Learning focus: convergent thinking; focused subject matter • Teaching styles: extreme amounts of teacher talk; direct learning • Leadership styles: teacher is authority/evaluator

3. Student-Centered Authority • Classroom organization: open, flexible furniture and teaching • Motivation: internal incentives • Discipline: equal teacher/learner control • Classroom climate: student voices encouraged, community of inquiry • Learning focus: divergent points of view, diverse subject matter • Teaching styles: less teacher talk, more learner talk, discovery-based learning • Leadership styles: teacher models participatory eval.

4. Classroom Organization • A multifaceted dimension of teaching that includes the content, method, and values that infuse the classroom environment, planning, and discipline practices • Lesson planning, physical setting, student assessment and evaluation • Motivation: internal emotion, desire, or impulse acting as an incitement to action

5. Motivation Responses: sources of power and types of responses • Coercion…to obey • Rewards…to get • Legitimacy…to respect • Charisma…to cooperate • Knowledge…to understand

6. Teacher Control • Low teacher control/ high student control…noninterventionist • Equal teacher control/ equal student control…interactionist • High teacher control/low student control…interventionist

7. Discipline • Noninterventionists…Thomas Gordon Teacher Effectiveness Training • Interactionists…William Glasser Schools Without Failure • Interventionists…Saul Axelrod Behavior Modification for the Classroom Teacher

8. Discipline • Choice Theory: What are you doing? What are you supposed to be doing? What is the rule? Are you making the best choices? • Assertive Discipline: Rules that students must follow at all times, Positive recognition that students will receive for following the rules, Consequences that result when students choose not to follow the rules

9. Classroom Climate • A holistic concept that involves a set of underlying relationships and a tone or sense of being and feeling in the classroom • Voice…the multifaceted interlocking set of meanings through which students and teachers actively engage with one another • Space…authentic public space, manner in which this space is maintained and type of space created (Maxine Greene)

10. Teachers as Agents of Change • Change as adaptation…promoting stability, enabling the student to adapt to the larger environment • Change as rational process…Deweyian idea of studying how social change happens and learning to direct it in ways that help society • Change as reconstruction…to a set of human goals based on cross-cultural, universal values • Change as dialectic…between the reproductive needs and self-actualizing needs

11. Teachers as Leaders • Vision: a mental construction that synthesizes and clarifies what a person values or considers to be of highest worth • Modeling • Empowerment: power in itself has no value structure…it can lead to good or bad results