The main part of my Educational Philosophy is that students should feel safe and welcome in a classroom. It is impossible to know what a student is going through at home and for some students they live for the structure and safety of being at school. It is my job to make sure that they feel same and welcome. I believe in the TRIBES model for a classroom which sets up a community in the classroom. Students will be seated in pods or tribes and they will form close bonds with their tribes partners. One activity I have done to help establish community in the tribes is a mystery picture. The first picture is the design I drew on all the papers and each tribe makes a design of their own. Each member chooses a color and will only use that specific one. One requirement is that there must be an equal amount of each color used in the picture. There should also be no white on the page so everyone is coloring. It helps students to practice in co-operation, negotiation, and problem solving. As the teacher you job is not to solve the problems that groups will have, but instead to help lead them down the path of coming to a mutual agreement that all community members are happy with. This activity not only allows students to have fun and expand their creativity, it also allows for students to practice working with their community.
The bottom picture is an activity my students helped construct. It is called the Ideal Classroom, each tribe writes a list of 4 to 6 ways that the ideal classroom should run. All of the ideas are written on the board and reviewed by the students. The students then vote and choose 4 to 5 activities or traits that the ideal classroom will have. Once the class has narrowed our list we write it on a poster. As students and myself as the teacher try to abide by the choices the class voted on when planning and spending time in the classroom. When the agreements are made by the teacher and the students, students hold themselves and others to the expectations they decided on for the community.
My final artifact is the 5 agreements posters that were hanging in the classroom I did my student teaching in. The 5 agreements are: no put downs, appreciations, listen attentively, participation with the right to pass, and mutual respect. These agreements are know school wide and taught every year to the students. In my classroom I would like to use a similar model to help establish a community where students can feel safe taking risks and trying new things.
The bottom picture is an activity my students helped construct. It is called the Ideal Classroom, each tribe writes a list of 4 to 6 ways that the ideal classroom should run. All of the ideas are written on the board and reviewed by the students. The students then vote and choose 4 to 5 activities or traits that the ideal classroom will have. Once the class has narrowed our list we write it on a poster. As students and myself as the teacher try to abide by the choices the class voted on when planning and spending time in the classroom. When the agreements are made by the teacher and the students, students hold themselves and others to the expectations they decided on for the community.
My final artifact is the 5 agreements posters that were hanging in the classroom I did my student teaching in. The 5 agreements are: no put downs, appreciations, listen attentively, participation with the right to pass, and mutual respect. These agreements are know school wide and taught every year to the students. In my classroom I would like to use a similar model to help establish a community where students can feel safe taking risks and trying new things.