Ms. Monomial

Culturally relevant pedagogy involves teaching in a way that displays a cultural understanding and involvement.   Being able to accomplish this in your classroom involves a major time commitment to understanding and involving yourself in your student’s cultures.   I work to build my cultural understanding of my students by simply getting involved in school events and holding conversations with them, just getting to know them as people, not just as students.   As a white woman teaching primarily black males, I have some ground to cover.   I do that by being open and kind and genuinely interested in what my students are involved in.   I go to their games, watch their recommended TV shows, and listen to their favorite artist.   This also helps me to build a rapport with them and improve the classroom environment in general.   In my school, cultural relevant pedagogy is very important to the highest level of success.   In order ...

The growth mindset is a core value in my teaching and in my classroom.  I have worked to build my classroom up as a “happy place,” where negative attitudes and conflicts are not permitted.  When something like this does come up, I regularly will stop what I’m doing to address it and come to a solution.  In the entirety of this school year, I have not had a single fight in my classroom, administered a single detention, or removed a single student from class, something that very few other teachers in my school can say.  I am very proud of this.  The time that I dedicate to not only teaching students about my content, but conflict resolution, communication, and general tolerance has without a doubt improved my students as humans and as members of society.  I frequently use the growth mindset to reinforce that, as many students who get into trouble take it as an un-fixable issue with themselves.  They will get into an screaming match with someone and the...

I teach in an extremely urban Baltimore community.   This area is primarily low to low-middle class homes with significant irregularities in home and family life.   Student home life is vastly unstable with minimal to slight structure.   Many students are homeless, in group homes, or in foster care placements.   Students who live with biological family are generally single parent homes or a step mother/father situation.   The vast majority of the school population is African American, with another significant amount of Hispanic students as well.   There is an extremely small amount of Caucasian and Asian students in the school.   The Hispanic population in the school is almost entirely in the ESOL program, and a significant amount of these students are new to the country.   The school is categorized as an ESOL center due to the high concentration of English Language Learners.   The community and demographics of my class...

The theorist that I see carry through to my teaching style the most is John Dewey and the idea that students learn through experience.   The experiential learning theory and Dewey’s ideas have several aspects that resonate with me.   These ideas have subconsciously shaped my teaching style, which is heavily based in the societal aspect of education and school rather than just a place of churning out pure content regurgitation.   The idea of students playing a part in crafting their education is a focus for me.   Especially for particularly unmotivated students, allowing them to have a say in their education can be a make it or break it aspect.   A major tenant of his ideas involve the notion that students should and need to be active participants and decision makers in the educational process.   This materializes, for me, as students sharing input on activity selection, assignments with student choice, or simply involving students in the planning process ...

One of my biggest goals for my educational career is to never become complacent.   I never want to think to myself, “man these kids just can’t/won’t do this work.”   This idea that “the kids are the problem” is an extremely problematic mindset for an education professional to have.   I think this promotes a self-righteous way of thinking for teachers that does not prioritize self-reflection, improvement, and professional development.   For me personally, I have a very internal locus of control when it comes to any facet of my life.   I feel very responsible for the outcome of my life and I feel like I have a high level of influence on how things turn out for me.   This translates to my teaching philosophy in a really great way that is going to benefit a lot of students.   When something is not going well, I think to myself “man, what can I do to improve this or make it better next time?” I believe this way of thinking places a lot of...

An experience recently where I had to reach out to administrative assistance was regarding an issue between two students in my class.   I am still unaware of the conflict details or what the root issue was about, but these two students were exchanging some tense words between the two of them during class.   I am the kind of teacher that is not okay with any tense behavior or conflicts between my students in my class.   Even if there is a major discord between students, I work with them on strategies to help them coexist and cope with the issue in a professional and calm way.   For these reasons, even for the slightest incident, I will pull the students out in the hall to have a quick conversation to nip the issue right then and there, which works without needing dean assistance most of the time.   In this case, one student refused to step out to talk to me, which was very odd for him, belligerently insisting that he did not do anything wrong. ...