My Teaching Philosophy Is That We as Teachers Gain Experience After Each Class
During the last year, while enrolled in this course, I understood different aspects of teaching more. To begin with what I learned, first I want to start off with a small bit of philosophy. This bit is, as teachers, we gain experience after every class we teach in how to conduct a lesson, provide the best teaching-learning environment and develop ourselves to become better teachers, every minute we teach is a minute gained in becoming a better teacher.
After that being said, throughout the years of my experience, I gained great and useful knowledge, but the knowledge gained was unorganized and all over the place. Mostly out of the experience, I know intuitively how to use that knowledge, but I do not have a clear understanding of the framework for teaching effectiveness. And this is the part where this course was most beneficial to my journey. The course clearly defines the four domains to be an effective teacher to take part in the students’ learning journeys. And it helped me to be more productive when reflecting on my work, now I can place my preparation and reflection against a measuring stick and clearly point out what went good, what went wrong and what can be improved.
I will start with the first domain, planning and preparation. who spends a lot of time when planning for a lesson; I start with setting the goals for the lesson, then looking for various appropriate materials that satisfy different kinds of learning styles. From the feedback of the observations that I had, I learned to be critical when choosing videos to present for the students, it has to be attractive and shows something new and different from what they are already introduced to. It is not only to tick that box; the main purpose is to enrich the content.
Another very important thing is to take time into consideration, to calculate the approximate time for each thing when planning, and not to over-plan in any way. When I was preparing, I wanted to cover every aspect I could think off in different ways, but this was not fruitful because of the inappropriate time allocated for activities. Better to have a few spare minutes towards the end of the lesson which I can make use of in different ways than to have over prepared material that I would fall short of covering by the end of the lesson. I should have listened to my heart in that matter because I know myself and my students and I know their pace in completing tasks.
