Reflection 8: What is your educational philosophy?

Progressive Learning

We all know that in today’s school system we all have to find different ways to teach the youths. Children learn in so many different ways and as future educators and as current educators we have to probe and teach to each individual child’s strengths and help them at the same time find ways to strengthened their weaknesses and build their self worth. Today we are faced with a problem in our education system, the problem is that a lot of educators are still teaching in their old teaching styles and refusing to rethink their styles, the only ones that are suffering are the students. American students score lowest in comparison to other countries, because of this failure to educate our students properly the government had to step in and reconfigure the school’s curricula, now the schools removed the majority of other learning disciplines; such as geography, history, economics and many other subjects that were used to expand the minds of students, now students are only learning the basics of education because they have to pass these state test in order to move forward to the next higher grade, these are the three subjects they are restricted to learning reading, writing and mathematics, even with these three subjects they are not required to learn more than just the basics in each.

Progressivism was started by john Dewey in 1920, Dewey discovered not every student learn the same, to further prove this point, dewy invented a school, which he called the University Of Chicago Laboratory Schools in 1897. This experiment was where he discovered the three different ways to teach and learn these three methods are auditory, visual and kinesthetic methods. Once teacher has discovered their students learning style they can then use that knowledge to better assist the child in their educational needs. You may notice a student in your class that takes instructions well and are only able to accomplish their tasks when they hear them out loud, you may nice a child that read or look at instructions, this student would be considered to be a visual learner, the last type of kinesthetic this is the learning by doing style, these students are mainly hands on and are able to work well with their hands and most times would not be able learn in the previous two styles. This discovery was very important because for years every since the conventional school were created. Students that were unable to learn using the conventional ways of learning were dismissed and no efforts were made to try to find a way to reach these students. In a progressive approach classroom you will see thought provoking games, such as scrabble, checkers or chess and also books, manipulate objects, there are also social interaction between students in the classrooms, this was to show students that they are all equal and to keep students from feeling inferior or superior to one another, activities such as fieldtrips outside of the classroom for educational purposes, this was a way to expand the minds of these students to a whole new experience.