Honesty, Empathy, & Respect
Honesty, Empathy, & Respect are the foundations of my teaching philosophy.
Honesty requires both myself and student engage in critical thinking and analysis - of content, ourselves, and each other. The study of the social sciences engages one in the journey of understanding humanity and one’s place in it. Rooted in principles of constructivism, building from students prior experiences, knowledge, and culture is paramount for deep engagement. Honest and critical reflection of my own teaching practices pushes me to continually improve, adjust, and differentiate instruction.
Empathy for each other and for the subjects we study. History is the story of humanity. Like all stories, readers and audiences connect most with characters they can show sympathy towards. So too, do student with the subject and sources we study. Instilling a deep sense of empathy for the human experience across time, place, and society connects student with a diverse set of experiences to draw conclusions from and to color their own lives.
Respect for each other and for what has come before us. Imagine looking into a mirror. First, as expected you notice yourself and then you look at your surroundings to give yourself visual context. So too do we gaze into a mirror as we study history: first noticing ourselves and then stepping backwards in time to contextualize our current lived experience. Showing respect for the lessons taught and learned by those before is paramount as we navigate the modern world.
Multi-modality in the classroom
The sociocultural approach to education emphasizes of building knowledge from a foundation of students’ experience and understood world. Engaging students in the fast-paced media rich landscape of the 21 st century has created a new- media discourse. I push students to thrive and engage with the media rich landscape they are steeped in; to inject intellectual purpose behind their creations, communications, and interactions. I believe creating emotional resonance is necessary to an empathetic approach to history. Building from the media-dense discourse students are steeped in, I aim to engage students experientially with the curriculum.
One such example of experiential learning that students were very engaged with was a lesson I created introducing the era of the Enlightenment. Students trace the development and growing complexity of music by listening to period authentic samples of music. While students listen, I elaborate on concepts and draw attention to subtle musical cues asking students to describe how the music makes them feel. Students experience the accelerating pace of ideas by hearing the growing complexity of music from simple religiously focused monastic melodies to the secular and/or humanist trends in of the Baroque and Classical eras of music. Experience the progression yourself:
Grand Ballet, Le Soleil: Les Planètes as an example of Baroque music (this piece was a commissioned specifically for the reveal of Louis XIV of France as the ‘sun king’ upon his 14th birthday).
Lastly, student compare music videos:
Translating a lifetime of creative work into pedagogy.
“A teacher who seeks answers to them is something like a jazz musician. The teacher uses many elements and approaches—sometimes planned and sometimes improvisational—to convey the message of the melody. It takes practice to be a good jazz musician. From the practice grows knowledge of music theory, a good ear for what is going on around the musician, a sense of timing, sensitivity to the meanings of the music, a tolerance for ambiguity, and creativity. The jazz musician never loses the melody but expresses it in many ways.”
April 13th, 2016 was the day that my entire life changed. A few weeks prior, aerospace company SpaceX had successfully landed the first stage their Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship in the middle of the ocean. This was a historic and game-changing moment for aerospace engineering with the first practical and reusable rocket. SpaceX had managed to accomplish this feat, from design to conception, in less than 4 years - a true testament to human ingenuity. It was a story that needed to be told. Over the course of a week I spent dawn to dusk compiling, editing, and annotating the Story of the Falcon 9 Rocket. I was incredibly proud of the work. As I left for a 3 week long vacation, I posted it on YouTube and tweeted out on twitter, tagging Elon Musk, the eccentric founder of SpaceX (and Tesla). The video is 4 minutes long. 5 minutes after posting the tweet, Elon Musk retweeted it.
To this day the video has amassed almost 1.2 million views.
This was my first inspiration for becoming a teacher.
Sample Lesson Plans & Activities
Facilitating Cultural Exploration through Group Investigation
“I’m looking for Latin heroes and Latin contributions, and I’m looking from cover to cover and there’s nothing about us, nada culo, d***,” he says while flipping through the pages of his son’s textbook. “Not one chapter, not a mention, not a single g*******d name — like we were absent all these centuries.”
Latinxs are woefully underrepresented in textbooks and public school curriculum. In my group investigation (GI) lesson plan in 670: Introduction to Curriculum and Pedagogy in Urban Schools I aimed to facilitate cultural exploration with the study of The Aztec Sun Stone. In the activity, students are presented with the image to the right. Students ask questions and pursue their own interests in small-group research.
As summative assessment for the lesson, students work in groups to create a museum caption for the artifact based on and cited with their research.
It was my goal to to provide an opportunity for Latinx students to find and explore the incredibly rich history of their ancestry.
The subject matter alone is a tacit attempt at cultural relevancy. However, when used in context of the Group Investigation model, the Aztec Sun Stone serves as a mere jumping off point for each student's’ intrigue to find their own path of curios engagement.
One of the main reasons that I want to be a history teacher is my insatiable curiosity. Each and every student has a story to tell from their own history. I hope to inspire the same discovery that John Leguizamo summed up in his son’s middle school graduation speech:
Leguizamo says, imitating his son Buddy. “But the biggest thing that I learned this past year while I was failing out of school was one thing my fellow classmates said to me: ‘You’re the king of nothing.’ But if the Mayans invented the concept of zero, then nothing is not nothing. If they can make something out of nothing, then my hero is me.”
Differentiation for Literacy & Language Development
Between my creative experience and a lifetime of translating for relatives, differentiating for language instruction felt second nature to me. Over the course of study in 672: Integrated Language Development Across Curriculum, I gained countless strategies and theoretical frameworks for differentiation. I hope to further my knowledge of differentiation by pursuing a Certificate of Gifted Education later in my studies at USC. For our final project, I was grouped with fellow secondary social science teachers to create an Integrated ELD Lesson Plan. In it, we highlight many examples of differentiated instruction built into the original lesson plan (a Gradual Release of Responsibility lesson I created for 670) and add several specifically designed elements, such as a supplemental sentence frame and keyword hand for English Learners. For the individual portion of the assignment, I added differentiated instruction for a higher English language proficiency. Click here to read the integrated ELD lesson plan.
Classroom Management: Differentiation in Socratic Seminar
“Socrates had no school and did not even regard
himself as a teacher. He did not lecture, and in fact distrusted speeches or
lectures, for they sailed too far and fast on rhetoric and evaded the closer
scrutiny of their cargo of ideas.”
The third model of teaching that we studied in my 670 class was Socratic Seminar. Late into the semester, I immediately recognized the potential for differentiated instruction and assessment, both formative and summative. In this lesson plan students will be placed in a fish bowl orientation – speakers in the middle surrounded by coaches in the following roles: comment counter, academic transition tracker, quote tracker, and minutes keeper. During half-time, big board students go over big ideas and points in the discussion thus far and each type of coach gives a brief comment about the discussion. The speakers will then be instructed to spend a few minutes with a group of coaches (at least one of each kind). Coaches will offer constructive feedback to the speakers.
This model engages a wide variety of students in differentiated tasks. My intention would be to repeat such a seminar to study text several times over the semester, giving each student an opportunity to take part in each role, building a multitude of creative, social, and thinking skills.
USC Coursework
When I sat down to write my first Grad. School essay, an Auto-ethnography, I realized that white men have a new brand of code switching. The switch is initiated in conversations involving equity, orientation, race, or gender. During such conversations, white men quickly turn inwards in search of shareable and relatable flaws - something, anything - that allows us to say “Hey, I’m a minority too!”
By engaging in critical cultural story telling, listening, and discussing, teachers can normalize empathetic communication in the classroom. (Camangian, 2010)
Within this context, I am lucky - I actually am a minority!
I’m a Ukrainian born Jewish immigrant. My family and I were eagerly embraced by Mother Liberty - as seen in the front page editorial announcing my (adorable) arrival to the quintessentially American sounding Midwest city of Springfield, Illinois.
Auto-ethnography is a method of learning about and understanding lived experience in order to benefit self, society, community, and culture (Camangian, 2010)
My facetiousness gave way to consternation at the realization of my privilege. How many immigrants aren’t afforded the same opportunity as me and my family? Further, how many American born people of color aren’t afforded the same opportunity?
Again, within this context, I am ‘lucky’ enough to have been made aware.
I titled my auto-ethnography: ‘Privileged Marginalization’.
“After years of my own internal socio-cultural wandering, I hope to foster a community of caring that allows students to fluidly explore a wide variety of perspectives on history and social sciences as they construct and identify their own opinions and identities. I consider it my duty to share the American dream so generously bestowed upon my family. I aim to build agency in my students to identify and address the inequities they may or may not experience in their daily lives; to envision and strive to accomplish their own version of their American dream.”
How do I know that I’m teaching?
I know I can talk. What has changed over the course of the study at USC is my ability to measure if my talking - dare I substitute talking for teaching - is effective. Even as I gained real intention behind my teaching through the study oftheory and writing lessons plans, my biggest concern was how to measure my efficacy.
I never thought I would be writing these words: the reading that spoke to me most this semester was about tests.
Chapter 7 of Teaching to Change the World’s title grabbed me, "Measuring What Matters.” In this chapter Oakes et. al. discuss the history, methods, and implications of assessment.
Everything really came together for me when this was combined with unit 3 in 671 on assessment. As my SDG group was tasked with presenting on the unit, we were also required to become experts in the content by proxy. I’m particularly proud of our presentation on unit 3 regarding assessment.