Goals of Teaching

     I have always felt that goals are an important part of the growing and learning process of each person.  Throughout the course of life, people make goals and then change when they complete them or when they need to be revisited.  Before I started observing in Trenton Central High School, even before I started attending The College of New Jersey, I had goals for myself as a teacher and my students as learners.  After spending a few months observing and working in Trenton Central High School and three weeks teaching two junior and senior trigonometry classes full time, I have revisited all of my goals and determined which of them I plan to keep working on and which goals need to be reviewed and then renewed.

     My goals before going into Trenton Central High School were somewhat broad because I was not sure what to expect from the classroom.  One of my goals was to create an atmosphere where my students would feel safe and comfortable enough to be willing to answer questions out loud and not feel like they will be ridiculed for wrong answers.  Another of my goals was to create a classroom structure where students could be actively involved in their learning at every possible moment during every lesson.  A third goal of mine was to work with my students to allow them to see the practical or real world applications of the work that we would be doing in class in order for them to gain a sense of the need to learn mathematics.  As my partner and I created our lesson plans and unit plan for the classes that we were to teach, we incorporated these goals into lessons as much as possible.  Our hope was that if we created our lessons around these goals that our classes would take to our lessons well and be able to gather as much information from the lessons as possible.

     After we spent many days observing the classes, we realized that some of our goals were not going to come to fruition.  Many of our students were very behind where they should have been in their mathematical education.  They were missing key concepts from previous chapters of the trigonometry lesson and from basic arithmetic and algebra skills that they should have learned in previous years.  This curbed our goal to allow our students to be actively involved in every lesson of our unit plan.  We found that we would need to do more direct instruction in order to help our students to get to a place where they would be able to learn the trigonometry necessary for our lesson.  Although we were not happy compromising our goals for their learning, we knew that it was necessary.

     During our lessons, we tried to incorporate as many practical and real world applications of our lessons as possible.  After completing our lessons we realized that, because of the lack of background knowledge of our students, many of the real world applications of trigonometry were lost to our students.  Although we completed our goal of allowing them to see the real world applications to the lessons, their struggles to overcome the mathematics of the problems lessened the effect.

     After observing these struggles that I had as a teacher and my students had as learners in this classroom setting, I have amended my teaching goals.  I still hold the goal of making my classroom safe and comfortable for my students so that they can feel free to speak in class without fear or ridicule by me or by their peers.  I plan to make sure that my classes are set up in this manner within the bounds of my power.  This goal has stayed constant in my mind.  I have altered my goals of having students actively involved in every lesson and using real world applications with every unit.  I still feel that these are important, and therefore have only altered these goals, not abandoned them.  I realize now that it is not always possible to expect students to be able to be involved actively in their education at all times.  There are many times when a teacher-centered, direct instruction approach is more appropriate for my students.  I have also realized that, while it is helpful for students to see real world applications to problems, it is not always realistic to have them work out the problems on their own, as we did in class.  It is more realistic sometimes to show them the applications.  The mathematics on some of these problems may be to hard for some students.