Math Aunty

Every teacher has one… when you were freshly entering the teaching field, you wrote your teaching hopes and dreams in the Teaching Philosophy or Teaching Statement that you submitted with your application. You knew exactly what you were doing and why you were doing it! You just knew that you would change the life of every child that you taught. Every August, as part of my ritual to prepare for the year, I read over my teaching philosophy to call on that energy. I think it would be awesome if educators shared their statements during those first day of school activities. Or perhaps, since we’re at the end of the year, reflect with the class on parts of your statement and your degree of success with them that year. Here is my teaching philosophy to start! (By the way, I laughed at this every year and how many of the things I wasn’t doing!)

Philosophy

Education plays a major role in our society. Teachers are often seen as another set of adults to please, which gives them the power to change individual futures, local communities, and the world. To successfully attain this goal, students need to learn in an environment that cares for them holistically as a human being. In fact, an advanced degree in mathematics didn’t seem attainable for me until I was in a program with faculty that cared about me holistically. Mathematics didn’t come alive for me until I started sharing it with others both informally with friends in the same courses and then formally as a teaching assistant and course coordinator. [School’s] commitment to creating that environment fits perfectly with my teaching philosophy; the four A’s. 

Accountability Numerous studies in education show that students feel better about a course when they have say in how the course runs. To that end, students will usually have a say in how class runs. For most lessons, I prepare two to three ways that class can operate for the given material; lecture, group work, or presentations. 

Throughout the year, I will meet with each student individually at least three times to talk about their progress within the course. During these times, we will create a portfolio of topics the student found interesting, questions they performed highly on, and areas that need more reinforcement. This allows me to tailor a final assessment to the data I collect looking at the set of portfolios as a whole as well as the portfolio being a definable measure of progress in the course, which will factor into their grade. This will help students move away from the percentage based success mindset and focus more on bridging the gaps in their learning that are necessary to fill in cumulative topics like math and computer science. 

Accessibility People learn in various ways and I want my class to be accessible to a wide range of learning styles. Depending on the level of the class and the material, being flexible can look like providing worksheets with formulas and explanations while leaving space for examples or ensuring that my notes are typed up if they need to be referenced. In mathematics in particular, it can look like explaining certain problems from various points of view. I’ve always made necessary revisions to the syllabus to accommodate students with disabilities that affect learning. Students being able to access the material is the difference between school as a facility for learning compared to the facility for behavioral control reputation that schools are getting now. 

Achievement Mathematics has the unfortunate reputation of being something students must memorize rather than learn. That belief permeates so deeply into education that by the time students reach college, they approach required math courses with a failure mindset. To learn mathematics, students must first unlearn mathematics as an insurmountable obstacle in the way of their success and recognize the beauty in unfolding problems until they can apply the skills they’ve acquired. To that end, we will measure achievement by celebrating improvement and seeing how far we’ve come to increase the desire to learn. Individual students measure this with their portfolios. Classes measure this because every week, there will be a concept outline of what we’ve done and how we’ve connected ideas to arrive to the next concept. 

Advanced students working with me will be challenged to go beyond the curriculum and delve into additional research topics to keep those wheels turning in their minds. Mastering the understanding of advanced topics will truly let students know that they can achieve in STEM. 

Assessment My assessment of students is growth dependent rather than a rigid set of percent ages. Math students will be assessed on their ability to communicate ideas through presentations, their ability to demonstrate mastery of concepts through quizzes and exams, and their ability to apply mathematical thinking to real world problems. Computer science students will be assessed on understanding how programming languages function, biweekly coding projects that uses the skills necessary to complete a final project, and exams. 

To assess myself on how well the four A’s work in the classroom, I have a list of goals.

Some goals can be measured in short amounts of time as students head to college with intentions to major in STEM fields and other goals will take more time to see the result of. These goals are what inspire me to teach in an environment that doesn’t cater to state testing with decreasing standards. These goals carry me through the highs and the occasional lows in teaching. 

^GOALS

1. Students will walk away from my classroom with a sense of confidence in their ability to tackle problems. I think of meeting my students at later points in their lives when I think of my goals for the classroom. If they can’t tell me Pythagoras’ Theorem but they can tell me how quickly they rose to top positions in their careers because of their problem solving capabilities, I will be content. 

2. Students will go on to create a well-informed society. The ability to identify logical gaps coupled with the confidence to challenge them will combat false narratives that may be prevalent in the media. They will also develop the confidence and communication skills to address these logical gaps in various settings and discuss them. 

3. Students will go on to increase diversity in STEM fields. Whether it be through directly encouraging underrepresented students to pursue careers in STEM, challenging impostor syndrome, or unpacking subconscious racist and sexist beliefs that have previously dominated STEM careers in those that will later hold the keys to letting others in STEM education programs or careers. 

4. Students will walk away from my classroom with the ability to clearly communicate mathematical ideas. One of the greatest barriers to mathematics is the inability of many mathematicians to present material in a way that interests others to pursue it. Learning programming skills definitely helps with building effective communication skills because a computer will only do exactly what you tell it to do. 

5. Students will walk away from my classroom more aware of the ways in which mathematics plays a major role in everything about our lives and how cultivating mathematical thinking will make them valuable assets in any field. Whether the students are our next top engineers and computer scientists, whether they go on to finish a doctoral degree, or whether they are calculating if those apples really are on sale, they will go on to recognize how mathematics plays a huge role in life and raise their children without the fear of math that has been so prevalent for so long. 

In conclusion, my teaching philosophy could be summed up by a commitment to moving forward. Sometimes your slope might change and forward requires a bit more effort than before. In our individual trajectories, we want to hold close those that run parallel but we will inevitably encounter those who run perpendicular and those who started at different points. My teaching goal is to give students the skills to handle these encounters and keep moving forward.

Teachers, what’s your favorite part in your teaching philosophy?