Running head: WHY WE LOVE TO TEACH

Why We Love to Teach

John Pierson
Ivy Tech Community College
October 5, 2014

WHY WE LOVE TO TEACH

INTASC Standard, Description, and Rationale

Standard #6 Assessment
The teacher understands and uses multiple methods of assessment to engage learners in
their own growth, to monitor learner progress, and to guide the teachers and learners decision
making.

Name of Artifact: Teacher Interview Project

Date: March 5, 2014
Course: EDUC 101

Brief Description: For this assignment I have interviewed a couple of teacher and tried to
understand the reasons why they teach and what goes on in the teaching world.

Rationale: In order to verify my interview of the teachers I wrote down their responses and the
date they were recorded. The interview required me to gain an understanding of what its like in
a teachers day to day world.

WHY WE LOVE TO TEACH

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Why We Love to Teach

Its that warm feeling you get deep inside when a child finally clicks and solves
something inside his/her head. In this paper I plan to show you the traits, philosophies, and
applications of two teachers I have interviewed. Their names are Alisha Lockhart and Tamara
Gore.
In the beginning there was an interview. The teachers I interviewed are very similar in a
lot of respects. They both have always wanted to be teachers. Mrs. Gore became a teacher
because her sibling has a learning disability and shes always been teaching her. Whereas Mrs.
Lockhart became a teacher because she felt it was a calling. They are both very stern, yet loving
with their students. I believe they are both behavioral teachers. So it seems like you were right
Mr. Buckle. Anyways, they both believe that the single most important quality for a teacher is
that they have to love what they do. Mrs. Gore especially believed that her heart had to truly be
in it for the kids and Mrs. Lockhart put out that same feeling when she spoke, but not those exact
words. Their classroom teaching strategies are very different. Mrs. Lockhart teaches using a
promethean board and her classroom has kids in a comfortable setting. However, Mrs. Gore has
her room set up to where the kids are in an old school setting where the desks are side by side
and row by row. She said that she did this because its what her students asked for. She goes up
to each kid individually and goes down the row helping them. The traits they believed to be the
most effective for a teacher were pretty similar. The traits that they said were, caring,
determination, integrity, resiliency, love. They seem to really care for their students and love the
work that they do. They both believe that you know youre successful when you see the students
face light up when they finally grasp a concept. They both also believed that there were some
good and bad for ISTEP testing. Mrs. Gore believed that students need to have a way of

WHY WE LOVE TO TEACH

determining the knowledge a student has learned over the course of the year, but she felt that it
didnt really capture the way a student conceptualizes or if a student does great in class and then
does badly on a paper test, she felt that it doesnt accurately show how intelligent that child may
actually be.
So by the end of it all this is what I have learned from interviewing these teachers. I have
learned that teachers can have very similar views and still be different in some major ways. I
learned that in order to be a successful teacher you need to determined and resilient. As a teacher
you need to love what you do and keep the students interest in what way works individually for
that child. When its all said and done, both of my teachers seem to really know what they are
doing and I plan on leaving this learning service with a lot of new knowledge about how to
operate a classroom.