A Reflection on the Development of my Pedagogy

 

My pedagogy was influenced a great deal by my experiences in this program, throughout my first four months I have learned a lot about education and I have also been influenced by the program here at UBC. I do not fully agree with the message we are presented with in the program and contrasting what I have been taught in many of my classes with the experience I have had in my practicum school I realize there are some flaws in how we are being taught. There is too much of an emphasis on the motto of the program Inquire, Imagine, Inspire and I believe that it is a detriment to the program as a whole. They  inquiry method I do believe has some merit and I think it can be an effective way to run a class project but the idea of having it as the basis of a classroom is unfeasible judging by what I have seen in the classroom. The role of inquiry in the program I believe is effective in the sense of using metacognition to assess our performance as educators and students. I do think it can be a misleading term however and foster inefficient reflection that does not objectively look into the issues that are being explored. Neutrality is another topic that has come up in some of my methods classes that I am very opposed to and this had affected my pedagogy a great deal. I am very opposed to the idea of being totally neutral on topics to not present a bias to students because I think that it does not allow you to fully understand an issue and it makes the class bland for the students. If you are able to take a position on a topic with your class and express your opinion while looking at the topic in an objective manner it will increase classroom involvement and help inject critical thinking into the classroom

My pedagogy has been shaped primarily through my experience both in the classroom and as a teacher during my practicum. One of the biggest changes in my pedagogy has been a shift away from a strong lecture component and towards a more student centered classroom. My initial pedagogy was due to teachers that I looked up to and admired who had a very strong lecturing component in their classes. This was one of their strengths and is not one that I believe I share so I have had to change my pedagogy when I began to teach and realize what my strengths as a teacher were. I began to believe in a much stronger student centered component of the class because I believe one of my strengths is the ability to engage the students with activities while scaffolding them through short lectures. This change happened because of my time in practicum where I got to teach my own class and experience what worked for me in the class and what didn’t. This assignment has also helped me work on my metacognition and allowed me to work at how I addressed my teaching and how I look at myself as a professional.

Another change that I underwent during my practicum was the realization of how much scaffolding many students needed before they could perform critical thinking.  This was surprising to me because I have been removed from the high school environment and had become used to teaching my university classmates. This caused me to be unprepared for the participation level that is typical for high school students and have to adapt to it once I was in class.

This exercise in general has helped me realize how much I have had to adjust to the different types of students that are present in a class and how differentiated a lesson has to be in order to appease their different modalities. A lot of my classes did help me prepare for this with the theory that they went over but the practicum was the most critical part of my development as a teacher.  Throughout this reflection on my pedagogy it has become clear to me that the most important thing for progressing my pedagogy was my time in the schools working with the students in class.