Week 6 Reading Response

1. Choose 4 bullets from the list on pages 88 & 89 of chapter 7 (repeat them in your posting), and explain why you believe these 4 traits, or beliefs, or mantras are true for you?

• Effective teachers spend a great deal of time working and interacting directly with students.

• High levels of teacher motivation relate to high levels of student achievement.

• Effective teachers are more concerned with student understanding of meaning than memorization of facts.

• Effective teachers know and understand their students in terms of abilities, achievement, learning preferences, and needs.

I feel that these four traits are true for me because I have seen them from past teachers. And the teachers that have shown these traits and been the best teachers I have ever had. With the first bullet point the most effective teachers are not just sitting at their desk telling the students what to do. The teachers are up walking around and interacting with the students. They are going to the students to help them out with any questions they might have. The effective teachers are not just sitting at their desk waiting for the students to come to them for help.

Teachers having high levels of motivation really help to motivate the students to perform better. Those teachers who are loving everyday what they are doing and showing their love for what they are teaching will help the students to be more motivated themselves. If students see the teacher being so excited to learn more about certain topics then the students will have higher levels of student achievement.

The teachers will realize that good students are not the ones who memorize everything. It is more important to them that the students actually understand what they are learning and will then grasp the concept better. If students are just learning to memorize they will not have a good grasp on what the concept means that they are learning. They will most likely forget what they memorized because it does not have meaning to them.

An effective teacher truly knows their students. The teacher needs to understand what their abilities are and how they prefer to learn in order to teach the students well. A teacher is not doing a good job teaching if they just teach the material to all the students and is not really teaching to certain students needs. An effective teacher needs to understand every single student in his or her class.

2. Comment on one of the metaphors in this chapter. Explain why it makes sense to you, or why you don’t agree with it.

I really like the metaphor where it says, "As he grows, the bread evolves,...and that makes him one with the bread." Just as the bread evolves (develops gradually from a simple to a more complex form) so do we as teachers. As teachers we may not have the best ingredients (ideas) but over time and practice we will develop a sweet taste to teaching. It is through trial and error that we make mistakes but with more practice and time we get better just as the bread tastes better every time.