Standard 1: My Reflection on Child Development.
I am currently working with middle school students and I plan to be doing this in the future. Above all, I want to be committed to the learners, be able to make rash decisions intelligently, be reflective in all the lessons I carry out, and thoroughly understand my subject matter. I have learned that child development comes with maturation, as well as, the different stages of development. The thinking, social skills, and other characteristics of middle school students certainly do differ greatly from those of younger or older children. I have learned that a trait in middle school children is that they quickly realize they do not understand a subject. They are much more willing to raise their hands and ask for clarification during discussion. This knowledge will help make me a better teacher because it fosters great discussions and new learning, and can be intentionally used as a strategy for teaching new subjects. .
I have discovered that experience alone makes you a better teacher. The more experiences a teacher personally has, the more he or she can communicate these new ideas to their students. Teachers do not need to quit researching subjects of interest. This will enhance their knowledge base and contribute to helping provide more opportunities for student growth. Teachers that ask questions to their students and attempt to research the answers as a group will help their students learn and retain useful methods for personal future research, as well as, their current knowledge base. There are so many types of research that teachers need to personally use and teach their students to use. These are descriptive, correlation, experimental, qualitative, scientific based, and action research. Using these methods and teaching the students to do so will help give everyone more opportunities to become more intelligent, as well as, help the teacher gain more knowledge of an array of subjects.