PED3155 - Bandwagon, Incoming!

Hello readers,

This week's topic is about joining and rejecting certain bandwagons in our educational careers.

If I were to ask someone about how they were taught a certain concept, then ask another person how they learned a concept, I’d probably get very different answers. This is entirely because of the fact that teaching is a very dynamic profession, and many of us tend to find ways to incorporate new and interesting ideas into the domain. The crave to provide new learning methods, however, can leave us easy prey to the newest idea of the month. We are constantly told of new methods by our peers in person, on twitter, and at conferences, all with glowing success stories. It thus falls on us as teachers to filter out what we feel is right and what we might leave for others to implement. In order to navigate through any bandwagon with a proper and just attitude, a teacher should always be cognizant of the end user: the students. If your new strategies won’t quite work for the students that you are currently teaching or are about to teach, then its likely that the new methods that are being presented to you aren’t really going to work. To build upon that, a teacher should be open to listening to these ideas and how they managed to improve someone else’s classroom environment. Focusing your sights on the problem that these new initiatives tackle may help us identify if a new idea is actually a solution to it, or a band-aid. Ultimately, we should maintain our professional learning networks and remain open to certain ideas before we immediately toss them out.

As an emerging teacher, it is incredibly easy to fall prey to the newest thing. Given that I have yet to see or try many of the strategies I have seen, I have very little to work off of when being a cynic. Thus, I believe that keeping my teaching strategies transparent to both my peers and the students (to a given extent) will help create an iterative process that leaves me open to feedback but also provides me with a foundation of which to solidify my current understandings. Thus, being diligent on doing research on these new strategies will absolutely help me stay away from most bandwagons, but not to a point where I reject the concepts outright.

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