Introduction

Looking back on my career in education, I find it surprising and enlightening that it feels a lot like raising children. I knew going into teaching that I enjoyed my trade and wanted to pass this passion on to the next generation. What I didn’t expect was the joy I experience watching people grow, find a passion, develop skills, and mature as individuals. It is remarkable watching students come back over their 4 years of apprenticeship and see them develop into professionals.

Professional Practice

In my professional practice I have several core values. I believe in continuous education for myself and in being a lifelong learner. I value professionalism and feel as instructors, we must hold ourselves to a higher standard of ethics and behaviour. I feel professional collaboration is important in all of teaching and plays a role in not only making us better teachers, but also in keeping our course content entertaining and relevant. In my classroom I value mutual respect between the instructor and students. I feel Piaget’s Cognitive Learning Theory is the one that best matches my style of educational practice as it applies to a Trades classroom. In cognitive theory, the educator focuses on the process of thinking. The learner “plays an active role in seeking ways to understand and process information that he or she receives and relate it to what is already known and stored within memory” (Kelly, 2012). I apply this model to my classroom by thinking out loud and modelling my thinking process while working through example problems. The examples are best drawn from student experience to maximize relevance to their practice. The ultimate goal is to develop higher order thinking skills in the students where they move beyond just remembering facts, to a place where they apply logic and troubleshooting skills to solve problems (Kerka, 1992).

I feel my role as a teacher is to act primarily as a subject matter expert and secondarily as a facilitator for a few select educational activities. I believe that success is directly proportional to effort and time and thus, feel my role is to encourage student motivation to put in this effort and time. In my experience, due to time constraints in the apprenticeship stream, the students look to the instructor as a mentor to guide them to the most efficient path of understanding the material. The instructor should endeavor to present all material in a motivating and engaging way. A final critical role of the teacher is that of classroom management. This can take a variety of forms but my philosophy is that, in adult education, students should be treated as adults and expected to act as such. A good classroom culture will facilitate management and can be created by setting expectations early in the class of what behaviour is and isn’t acceptable regarding attendance, language, and respecting other students. The instructor should model good behavior by being punctual and showing enthusiasm for the course material.

The role of a student in my classroom is largely centered on the concept of Self-Regulation. I work in an adult educational environment and tend to expect my students to act as responsible adults. To this end, I set the expectation that students must show up, do required assignments, and actively engage with class activities and discussion. If the student does these things and strives for understanding, passing the course is an almost inevitable side effect.

My approach to motivation in the classroom uses anecdotes and storytelling as a bridge or hook to emphasize the relevance of course material prior to delivering lesson content. Exams and grades are effective extrinsic motivators, however I tend to focus my instruction on speaking to student’s intrinsic motivation to understand and excel in their trade. I have a firm belief that meaningful learning does not take place unless students can see where material can be applied. A strategy for classroom engagement I use is to treat lectures as a class wide conversation. I guide the conversation with a scenario addressing the topic of the day, mirror thought processes, troubleshooting steps, and math solutions. The students are continually engaged because I do not simply show them the steps and solutions; I look to the class for the solutions. I encourage active conversation and celebrate wrong answers as much as the right answers. These lessons and the tangents associated with wrong answers lead to some of the most valuable teachable moments.

Electrical Trades instruction is a mix bag of teaching understanding, troubleshooting, safety, electrical code, and theory. The program follows the Competency Based Education model which I am most comfortable teaching. When assessing these competencies, I believe instructors must pay particular attention to the alignment of assessment with course objectives. Further, instructors must be diligent to ensure that assessment instruments are valid and reliable. From a teaching philosophy standpoint, I believe in both formative and summative assessment. I will typically use quizzes as formative assessment. They are used as study material and to provide feedback to the student of where their understanding currently lies. The use of frequent formative assessment helps to reduce student test anxiety by making assessment a very normal part of the learning process (Ugodulunwa & Okolo, 2015). End of unit exams are summative and weighted much heavier to align with the goal of assessing if competencies have been met.

Final words

As educators, I feel we are never really done learning or developing our teaching styles. Teaching is a fluid process and for every rule, there is an exception. The above narrative captures my current teaching style and philosophy but I don’t believe I will ever be done trying new techniques.

References

Kelly, J. (2012). The Peak Performance Center: Learning Theories. Retrieved from

Theories

Kerka, S. (1992). Higher Order Thinking Skills in Vocational Education. ERIC Digest No. 127.

               Retrieved from: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED350487

Ugodulunwa, C.A. & Okolo, U.P. (2015). Effects of Formative Assessment on Mathematics Test Anxiety and Performance of Senior Secondary School Students in Jos, Nigeria. Retrieved from:

http://www.iosrjournals.org/iosr-jrme/papers/Vol-5%20Issue-2/Version-2/F05223847.pdf

PIDP 3260: Assignment 4 – Reflection #2

Objective

For this reflective writing assignment I’ve chosen to reflect on Brookfield’s quote from The Skillful Teacher, ‘’Teaching is frequently a gloriously messy pursuit in which shock, contradiction and risk are endemic” (p. 1). In this quote, Brookfield is acknowledging the realities of teaching. The first paragraph of the book sets the tone that this is not an idealistic book written by an infallible peer. I feel Brookfield’s tone sets it up more as a survival guide for the classroom.

Reflective

I chose this quote because I felt it was an extremely strong way to start the book. I think most teachers can relate to the quote as I believe we have all felt that way about teaching at some point. I know in my experience, just as I think I may have perfected my delivery, the entire lesson goes off the rails with one question or comment from the students. Teaching is messy because we are dealing with rooms full of diverse people. The art in teaching is dealing with these messy situations! We are basically professional muddlers.

 Interpretive

We must expect the unexpected in our classes. There is an inherent risk in putting ourselves out there as a subject matter expert. We must be able to think on our feet and change course at the drop of a hat. I feel the messiness of teaching is one of the things that makes it such an interesting career path. Eyler and Garfinkel describe learning as “both beautiful and frustrating, leading to just as many dead-ends as breakthroughs in the classroom” (2017). There is something magical when you see students make intellectual connections, and defeating when understanding is just not happening. This is inherent in the process so we as educators should embrace the messiness. For, if we are continually trying to better our teaching practice, we are bound to fail now and again.

Decisional

Perhaps the most profound realization I had from this quote is that teaching is messy for everyone. I knew it was for me, but it is comforting to know it is a universality. This realization gives me the courage to embrace the messiness instead of trying to eradicate it. I will continually try to perfect my delivery of information, but will spend more time trying new techniques in an effort to reach everyone.

References

Brookfield, S. D. (2015). The Skillful Teacher. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.

Eyler, J. & Garfinkel, J. (2017). Teaching is messy. We need to embrace that. Retrieved from:

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/gray-matters/article/Teaching-is-messier-and-more-human-than-laptops-10897945.php

The Scenario

Joe is not the strongest of students. He is over 50 years old, has 25+ years of work experience in the electrical industry, but has a history of struggling to pass trade school. He is part of the electrical union and enjoys his work, but they are starting to push him to complete his schooling. Joe may lose his job if he doesn’t start working towards his certification.

Joe enters Electrical Level 1 and attends every class in the 10 week period. He participates regularly in class and offers a valuable real-world perspective with anecdotes to the content being taught. Unfortunately, electrical is heavily based in math and Joe struggles with basic math skills. The instructor refers him to the Math Help Centre. Joe gets a math tutor through the union, and takes advantage of the instructor’s office hours. Unfortunately, even after all this work, Joe writes his final exam and fails the course by 1%. Joe meets with the instructor after the final exam and asks if the instructor can review his grading to help Joe pass Level 1. The instructor is torn: Does he pass or fail Joe?

The Dilemma

This situation is a justice VS mercy dilemma. If we are to strictly follow the testing results, then Joe should fail. However, who benefits from Joe failing Level 1? Does Joe? Society? The union? His employer? This situation may call for some mercy to be shown towards Joe. Resolving this dilemma requires either using rules-based thinking or care-based thinking. I think rules-based thinking would be appropriate if Joe did not ultimately meet the outcomes of the course. It would be unethical to pass a student who hasn’t met the learning outcomes. Because he did meet the learning outcomes, I feel a care-based solution is most appropriate.

Resolution

Ultimately the situation was resolved by passing Joe. I made it very clear that he should not even consider registering for Level 2 until he takes a math upgrade course, as well as a course on trigonometry. I rationalized this choice because, especially in Level 1, students can be overwhelmed early on and lose too many marks in early heavily weighted sections to pass the course. I assessed his final exam for meeting the basic outcomes of Level 1, and felt that he did meet them. I felt that if Joe did not take my advice on math upgrading, then he surely would not pass Level 2, and no harm would be done.

Reflection

This incident was the first time I encountered a situation where I had to make a significant judgment call in my practice. I believe I made the right call in the situation because Joe did meet course outcomes. I believe it is a failure in our grading system and unethical to heavily penalize someone for being a late bloomer. At the time I was a new instructor so I reached out to my peers before unilaterally making the decision to pass him. It is unfortunate that as an epilogue to this story, Joe didn’t take my advice and upgrade his math skills. He ended up failing Level 2 in a spectacular fashion.