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Pedagogical Paradigms in Education:

Teaching Persona Reflection

Lauren Snyder

Georgia Southern University

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Pedagogical Paradigms in Education:

Teaching Persona Reflection

Teaching is defined as a way of providing knowledge by instruction. Teaching to

me is one of the most rewarding jobs out there. In America teachers are not only guiding

students and society through an educational journey but teachers have become more like

family in many classrooms across this country. Teachers face issues everyday that are

challenging and very emotionally charged. Students may come from poverty, abusive

backgrounds, divorces, sudden deaths, or even rape. Teachers have to not only be

mentally prepared for the tasks at hand but they also have to be emotionally prepared for

some of the other issues society faces.

We really need to take a step back and think about education and what teachers

really mean to us in our world today. Do we really recognize what teachers do for us in

the classroom, or have we always just expected to have “good” teachers. The class I am

observing at Mill Creek Elementary School has introduced an unbelievable amount of

things to me that I have never really taken the time to notice in any of my classrooms.

Mrs. Price is one of the best teachers I have ever met, she is a kindergarten teacher and

you can just tell in her eyes she loves every one of her students. She really does go the

extra mile. Her room is decorated to a tee, with art work made but the kids, educational

posters, and she even has a little animal station where she has a caterpillar that is going to

turn into a butterfly and ladybugs for the students to observe everyday. She provides

snack for them everyday and every Wednesday they go to the special education room and
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have a snack and read a story. Her desks are arranged in a way that the students can

interact with one another, helping each other if it is needed. Her room also has a rug

where students can all congregate and listen to her mini lessons she has everyday. She

will sometimes have stories on the rug, sing songs, and talk about the weather and for

example the months of the year. She allows them time to get out of their desks and sit as a

group. The class feels like a family not just a classroom where the teacher talks and the

students listen. Being in a kindergarten class there is a wide variety of students on very

different levels of intelligence and coordination. She sometimes breaks them up into three

groups, the students are grouped together on levels of ability, this helps to get the brighter

students working on things that don’t bore them and helps the lower students get more

one on one attention that they need. There are so many ways you can improve your

classroom atmosphere and so many different ways teachers can accomplish that.

There are many different theories on teaching and teaching styles. Over the years

we have seen teachers change there ways of teaching from transmissionist, constructivist,

liberatory, to post-liberatory. These different groups have many good qualities and some

bad qualities. There is no such thing as a “perfect” teacher but there is some wonderful

research being done about students and teachers that education majors need to study and

understand. When you think of teaching you probably think of all the students’ lined up

in rows of desks across the classroom facing the teacher. Back in the 1950’s this is how

schools were run for the most part. Students were assumed to be “blank slates” and the

teacher would “inscribe” the knowledge. The teacher was considered the all-knowing

figure. Then around the 1980’s the civil rights’ movement occurred and things began to

change. A more transmissionist way of teaching started to flourish across the nation. This
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type of learning was student based, the students were in charge of their own learning and

the teacher just helped to guide the students through more difficult areas which is called

scaffolding. There are wonderful things about this technique but it also has its down falls,

students sometimes stay in there comfort zone and they never really try to push

themselves like a teacher can. Then there is liberatory, which was formed in the 1990’s.

This paradigm teaches about equality in education. It helps to emphasize on multicultural

aspects of education. This style of teaching is trying to identify, recognize and value

diversity in our nation. The down falls of this are that some schools may misrepresent

some cultures and over examine them. Lastly we have post-liberatory which is today’s

current style of teaching and was formed around year 2000. This group of teachers have

combined all the paradigms and kind of created a mix of all three but with some tweaks

in them. Post-liberatory teachers question the purpose of education and take an active role

in the students’ and their home lives. One of the draw backs is just because teachers

recognize the problems we have in our schools today doesn’t mean they have all the

answers. Educators across the nation are trying new things developing new theories about

how education can improve. But I don’t know if there will ever be a “right” way to run a

classroom. Every teacher is different with different backgrounds, as well as the students.

No super teaching style really can ever be made it just takes experience and learning from

your mistakes as well as others.

You can see many teaching styles not only in the classroom but through the

media. Some examples of this can be seen in the movies Stand and Deliver, Dangerous

Minds, and the television series Boston Public. These drama filled pieces are full of real

life events that take place everyday. Jamie Escalante is a liberatory that devotes his life to
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teaching. He wants to help underprivileged students have a chance to make it in society.

He sees the potential in his students that others in the school system and state do not. He

pushes his students to want more, he wants them to get good paying jobs and grow and

develop into young adults that believe in themselves. He wants poverty, violence and

hatred to end, and he believes that having an education and teaching them not only

calculus but also life long lessons can change their lives. At the end of the movie he has

formed a group of students that have not only achieved what they wanted but above and

beyond anything they ever could have imagined. Most of the students graduated passing

the calculus exam and even went onto college, a dream that never seemed possible before

Escalante came into their lives. Dangerous Minds and Boston Public also incorporate

some of the paradigms and show just how much teachers really can face. I think that

every education major should see these films. They are at times heart breaking but in

reality they are true and need to be addressed.

Students often come from bad home lives and have other problems that seem to

get in the way of education. We as educators really do need to put in the extra effort to

ensure our students that we care about them and what is going on in their personal lives.

There are so many different kinds of problems that students are going to face;

emotionally, physically, culturally, and economically. Teachers need to recognize

different and new ways of handling students’ needs, not just academically but also

socially. I think that this generation of teachers is going to improve our school systems

across the country dramatically and develop yet another paradigm.

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