There is a Chinese Proverb that goes, “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.” I understand this to mean that students will learn more of what they have been able to play around, experiment and interact with than when they sit at a desk and listen to someone talk. It also acknowledges the middle ground of observation, which includes videos and other demonstrations. To me, this highlights experiential learning and exemplifies the style of teaching that I strive and plan for. Because this was originally Chinese and translated into English, the language is simple but my experiences and perspectives lend me to see it as saying the strength of people is through connection and experience.
One way that I envision implementing experiential learning into my classroom is embodied in a lesson I am currently planning. The lesson is on financial literacy and I am planning to give them scenarios that they need to design budgets for. I will scaffold this by creating a budget in front of the whole class so that they can see the expectations for the assignment. I will end the class with the students sharing their scenarios and how their budget helps. This takes the form of showing and involving.
When writing this philosophy response, I researched many philosophical quotes about teaching and learning. It was a great opportunity to see the philosophies that are commonly accepted and rejected. It was interesting to see where I aligned and disagreed.
Eastern Education and Philosophy
This assignment covered a significant portion of the world and simplified it to the bare bones. We only barely touch on the basics of each country and religion within the Eastern realm. This is a topic that I am deeply interested in and enjoyed analyzing the different cultures and religions from an education perspective.
Flanders Field Choral Reading
My biggest takeaway from this lesson was the importance of timing and the short attention span of the students. During the group practice time, the different personal dynamics in the class left me flitting from one group to the next, putting out fires. When I teach it again, I plan to give them a shorter time, and if there are any issues, I will switch team members so that I can quickly acknowledge and solve the issues.
Christmas Ad Libs
This lesson taught me that the students will do well if they have the support they need. In this lesson, I prepared a slide that gave suggestions for different verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and nouns they could use in their ad-libs, but there was one descriptor category that I didn’t plan for, and it caused many of the students to get frustrated and feel less capable. I quickly wrote some suggestions on the board, which solved the problem. I saw very clearly that the students wanted to do well and engage, but before I gave them support they did not have what they needed to do that.
These two pictures and the video are of science experiments my fellow Teacher Candidates led. I was excited to participate in their activities. Especially the bottle rocket launch. It was interesting to see how they decided to present the science behind the activity and how they set up the safety protocols. From these experiences, I learned that there are many ways to introduce a topic, but it is important to make connections at the beginning.
Bottle Rocket Launch
Always excited to engage in exploration.
I planned, wrote, edited, and published this book. It is a fun start to an ongoing series project.