Exit Interview

I am happy to announce that nearly everyone passed his or her exit interview with flying colors (FYI that expression comes from military lingo, referring to when an army would fly their colors upon winning a battle – wikipedia is great.)

Lacie asked me to make a summary of some of my findings and thoughts resulting from the exit interviews. Here is a brief smattering:

First, let me mention that one’s teaching philosophy is somewhat a personal endeavor that should be continuously revisited, revised, and developed; however, I should advise that unless you actually take the time to write about and actually express what your teaching philosophy is I don’t think your philosophy will be of much service or clear to you or anyone else. Hence the reason why I really wanted you to reflect, write, and verbalize (share) this with me. It was interesting to listen to your responses and learn from each of you. I hope you found the experience beneficial.

As you might realize the entire exam you wrote had to do with your teaching philosophy and really didn’t need to be broken down into parts; in fact I was waiting for someone to come into their exit interview and to spew out everything they had written (to be honest I don’t think that would have been inappropriate.)

I hope it is clear to you that your teaching philosophy can be as simple and or detailed as you like, however, I would again advise you to fault on being too over detailed. Included in your “detailing” efforts you should include key “educational buzz-words (contemporary accepted/ used terms in the educational community); here’s the list:

Student led instruction, data driven instruction, formative assessment, summative assessment, evaluation, formative evaluation, summative evaluation, rubrics, learning growth and progression, student conferencing, peer collaboration, student collaboration, critical reflection, self-evaluation (assessment), life long learners, teacher pacing, critical thinking, problem solving, teaching passion and personality, teacher professionalism, creative dynamic learning environment (re: your classroom and teaching approach), standards based, moral dimensions, scaffolding, transfer of knowledge, etc.

(If you are unfamiliar with how these words/ phrases tie into your teaching philosophy let me know and we can further discuss them; in fact if you would ever like to put me on the “hot-seat” and hear my responses to the questions I posed to you during your exit interview please feel free to drop.)

Below I have listed the type of questions you answered during your exit interviews (hopefully you notice that each of the questions subsequent to the first question asking: ‘what is your teaching philosophy’ all are in essence part of the response to what is your teaching philosophy.)

What is your teaching philosophy?

What is learning?

What is teaching?

What does effective high quality teaching look like?

What is the role of a learner?

What is the role of a teacher?

Tell me about the moral dimensions of teaching.

Tell me about the Standards for Technological Literacy.

Tell me why you feel technology education is important.

What are and tell me about the roles of assessment and evaluation in learning?

What does your classroom environment look and feel like?