This
chapter addressed the effectiveness of teaching in three common fields in
elementary, middle, and high schools. These fields were History, Mathematics,
and Science. It was very explicit and provided examples on how being an
effective teacher does not mean that one can teach every field, and that the
most successful teachers are actually incredibly resourceful and proficient in
their field. Further, their skills are tailored to the specific field in which
they teach. They retouched on some examples of History we had seen before, and
how it can be a field to learn facts in, or a field where you study and
interpret certain events in order to deduce what actually occurred in history.
The example of Bob Bain struck home quite quickly in the sense that I was really
disappointed in my experiences in History throughout school. I had never
experienced a professor like him or Ms. Kelsey, whose strategies seem to
actually engage these students in a historical adventure which I now seem to
yearn. Some of the issues I found with
the chapter were that it did not provide a figure which I was imagining in my
mind. I really desired a graph that would illustrate the skills needed to be a
math, history, and science teacher, and what skills could be extrapolated to be
your cookie-cutter teacher model. Something that I felt the chapter did not
elaborate on was the concept and effectiveness of ‘team teaching’. I had
previously read a few articles that highlight some of the benefits of groups of
teachers who work in collaboration to help their students learn more. I found
one example that combined a biology course and a business course in college to
develop a “community composting food waste network” (Little & Hoel, 2011) . This related a lot
to a course I had taken here at Georgia Tech (a special topics course on ICT4D
with Professor Michael Best) which combined a variety of different majors to
collaborate and work on projects. The efforts of Professor Best to bring
different students together truly changed my way of thinking, not to mention
the excitement I had to get involved in different volunteer projects to help
developing nations. I bring this all back to the methods of teaching and
learning that I have been involved in. As much as a professor needs to be
incredibly proficient in his/her field, I firmly believe that the collaboration
of fields also has an incredible potential to bring topics to sensible
applications and not abstract representations, which allow students to further
understand and make connections they would have not reached previously.
Works Cited
Little, A., & Hoel, A. (2011). Interdisciplinary
Team Teaching: An Effective Method to Transform Student Attitudes. The
Journal of Effective Teaching, XI(1), 36-44.
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