Critical and Creative Thinking Skills

When I first started my journey of becoming a teacher at Parkside in the Fall of 2019, one of my very first tasks was to start thinking of my teaching philosophy.  Having spend so little time in classrooms I really wasn't sure what to include in it.  I started with more of a behavior based philosophy, but as I spent more time in different classrooms throughout the years, it definitely evolved to be aimed towards the attitude of the students.

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In my most recent education course, EDUC 402, we were assigned a research paper that discussed the best teaching practices in our content area, with mine being math.  With this paper, we were to research the best methods that have been proven successful in classrooms similar in age to the ones we were teaching in at the time, and were encouraged to try these practices in our own classrooms.  The practice that I chose to research was growth mindset in mathematics.  The research addressed the problem of low math achievement of middle school students through the use of a growth mindset intervention.  The strategies that were used during this intervention were: celebrating mistakes, praising the process rather than the person, giving feedback for learning, and providing challenging math tasks.

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In my time at Mahone Middle School in Kenosha, Wisconsin, I was able to implement these strategies in order to help the students obtain the right mindset.  In math particularly, so many students have a fixed mindset, where they believe that the intelligence that they have is set in stone and cannot improve, and this is what I was trying to fix.  It was a challenge, trying to fit the right strategies with the right students, but the two that I found to be most effective on my classes, were celebrating mistakes, where I emphasized that making mistakes is a normal part of the learning process and actually helps the learner become more understanding of a topic, and providing feedback for learning, so students can reflect on their learning and understanding rather than just see a final grade.

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Since implementing these strategies in my classroom and seeing how much they impacted my students learning, my teaching philosophy has drastically changed.  What started as a measly 'we will work hard and follow directions', changed to how to make math fun, how to make math possible, and how to make math relevant.  Since researching this topic, my critical and creative thinking have helped me change a lot about what it means to be a teacher and how you can really change a students life.  I'm no longer just going into classrooms forcing students to learn math, but helping them open their own minds to new possibilities which is a skill that they'll be able to use the rest of their lives.