Memories

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I remember the tree I chronicled for a year in Mrs. Drew’s fourth grade class. The sticky scent of pine. The dark bark.

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I remember the Civil War poems Mrs. Mumbrue encouraged me to write in fifth grade. I filled notebooks with melodramatic elegies to fallen brothers in places like Antietam and Devil’s Den.

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I remember peering through a microscope in Mrs. Bachta’s seventh grade science class. I watched the organisms somersault and wondered how they evolved. Mrs. Bachta didn’t tell me; she asked more questions.

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I remember Ms. D’Agostino’s bright high heels, how they rang down the hall, a call to ready ourselves for another deep dive into Dickinson, Faulkner, Frost.

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I remember my confidence growing post by post on the class blog in Barbara Ganley’s creative class. Quiet in class, I wrote loudly online, learning from and with my peers until my voice carried from the screen to the classroom and back again.

I have more memories, of course. I offer these now because they help me understand why I became a teacher. They communicate what I recognize today as pedagogy. As a way of sparking curiosity and fanning the passion of lifelong learning. I recognize in these memories the experiences that would shape my own teaching philosophy.

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Mrs. Drew, Exploration, and Motivation

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Take Mrs. Drew and her assignment to adopt a tree in the woods behind my elementary school. A different teacher might have read books to us about trees or shuffled through transparencies as she droned about coniferous versus deciduous. Not Mrs. Drew. She instilled wonder. She motivated us to explore our world on our terms.

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In my English classes, wonder and exploration manifest themselves in different ways. For example, after reading Sandra Cisneros’ book The House on Mango Street with my 9th graders, I assign students to write and revise a memory of a scene involving the places or people in their lives. Students have examined the known realms of their backyards and the less familiar stretches of road trip highways and steep mountain paths. They’ve followed their curiosity about an odd Goth neighbor and a taciturn grandpa. Their findings inevitably lead to fresh insights. Their words illuminate their worlds, placing them at the center of their experience while honoring that experience and acknowledging its value.

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The project does not end with their revised vignettes, however. I partner with YouthSpin, our weekly student-produced radio show, to broadcast their vignettes a local radio station. Students record themselves reading their pieces, and for several months, they can tune in to hear their story and the stories of their classmates play over the airwaves. 

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The project is one example of how I create a sense of competency, autonomy, and relatedness in my students. These three attributes are also what the psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan argue maintain intrinsic motivation (Tough, 2016). A foundational principle of my teaching philosophy, supporting students’ intrinsic motivation would not be possible without two more influential ideas: constructivist and constructionist theories of learning.

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Mrs. Bachta, Constructivism, and Constructionism

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Mrs. Bachta, my seventh grade science teacher, understood the need for students to actively construct knowledge through experience. A constructivist educator, she ditched the textbooks and worksheets and let us loose with microscopes and guiding questions because she recognized “learning is an ongoing process of construction and revision of mental representations” (Sheridan et al., 2014, p. 507). In other words, how boring to be handed a picture of a flagellum when instead you can peer through a lens and wonder about that weird flailing thingy you only later come to know is a flagellum.

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A constructionist theory of learning builds on constructivist theory by stating that a learning outcome focuses explicitly on how the making of an artifact supports conceptual understanding. In constructionism, “the artifact itself functions as an evolving representation of the learner’s thinking” (Sheridan et al., 2014, p. 507). I embrace constructionist learning principles by challenging my students to make models. Building models provides students the freedom to play with and give shape to the ideas being examined in a particular lesson or unit. The act of creating a model helps students transform complex abstractions into concrete representations, a process that results in difficult concepts becoming more understandable (Henriksen, Terry, & Mishra, 2015). Interpreting a completed model allows both my students and me to see thinking made manifest. Subsequent discussions permit me to reinforce creative, productive thinking strategies while questioning a student’s misconceptions in order to correct them. Making models therefore accomplishes two critical goals: it revitalizes the role of joy in learning while simultaneously providing students and teachers alike essential feedback on how well a student understands complex ideas.

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Barbara Ganley, Social Participation, and Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge

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The notion of serious play guided much of what we did in Barbara Ganley’s creative writing class my freshman year of college. Our play occurred in two environments: the classroom and online. The latter experience has stayed with me all these years. On the blog, we posted responses to assigned readings, we posted our own creative writing, and we posted comments on our classmates’ work. I am a quiet learner. I tend to listen and observe during class discussions, and I use written assignments to collect and express my ideas. The blog proved to be a place where I could share my ideas in ways that I did not, at first, feel comfortable doing in the classroom. Rather than a theoretical audience (which was usually just the professor), I now had a real audience of my peers, a record of their thoughts, and means to explore those thoughts and my own in a context where I felt freed from the pressure to sound brilliant each time I opened my mouth. My confidence bloomed. Within a month, I regularly raised my hand in class. My writing voice was no longer the only voice I used to communicate.

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I now understand the blog’s success to be the result of dialectical constructivism and the power of social participation. I incorporated these learning theories into my own pedagogy. For example, my students occupy several zones of development. If Student A is struggling, I call over Student B, who happens to be in Student A’s proximal zone of development, and ask both students questions with the intention that Student B’s problem-solving skills are useful to Student A. My rationale for such a structure is Lev Vygotsky’s assertion that the “developing child…imitates the cognitive skills modeled by skilled members of the community” (O’Donnell, p. 65). By emphasizing the community’s power for instruction, I apply the research from Bandura (2000) that illustrates “When individuals participate in a valued activity together, they may experience collective efficacy” (O’Donnell, p. 64), meaning that not only will Student A benefit but so will Student B.

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My experience with the class blog continues to shape how I think about teaching and learning. For one, the blog demonstrated the power of technology to positively impact the classroom. The technology was not superfluous; rather, it was central to the class’ educational aims and culture. No one — at least to my knowledge — questioned why the professor had us posting on a blog. The blog felt necessary, vital. My professor also knew how to utilize the technology, intervening here and there with a question or comment, but more often than not she watched where we’d take the conversation and the technology’s ability to facilitate our conversation. Then, when class convened, she referenced the blog’s discussions, extending them further. Our classroom conversations gained a richness that would’ve been impossible to attain without the blog.

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I’m an optimistic skeptic when it comes to technology in my classroom. When I’m considering a digital technology, I return to my experience with the blog to judge whether or not the technology is required for the learning objectives. I also now apply the Technological, Pedagogical, and Content Knowledge framework (Kereluik, Mishra, & Koehler, 2011) to identify and examine the affordances and drawbacks of a particular technology. Such critical thinking helps me determine whether and how I can use a technology to enhance my students’ learning.

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Onwards

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I don’t remember the exact moment I wanted to become a teacher. I don’t remember a flash as it hit me: I shall be a teacher. Instead, I’ve been called to teach from the accumulated inspirations I experienced with Mrs. Drew and Mrs. Mumbrue, with Mrs. Bachta and Ms. D’Agostino, and with Barbara Ganley. I am a teacher because I remember the wonder I felt in their classes, and I see that wonder when I step aside to observe a room brimming with young people working together to build and debate and solve.