Domain

B: Skills

One of the things that I love most about teaching is that it requires so many diverse
skills. As teachers, we are constantly drawing on different strengths and using these
to move the lesson or class forward. Without teaching skills, content knowledge is
not useful. I have developed several key skills during my time at Hunter. These
include skill in planning, teaching, assessing my students, and in developing caring
learning environments.

My skill in planning has developed greatly over my time at Hunter. Given the
informal and flexible nature of the independent school where I currently teach, this
skill was not highly refined. Because our learners often struggle with the content,
teachers are used to being flexible with their plans and making choices on the fly
about what to cover and in what level of detail. Thus, for the first years of my career
and the beginning of my time at Hunter, I had not had a great deal of training doing
formal planning. As part of my classes at Hunter, I had to learn to write formal
lesson and unit plans and needed to implement them. Being required to consistently
write formal plans helped me consolidate my thinking about how a lesson should
proceed and what is important as a teacher. I have a set of routines that I follow
more closely in my lesson plans: a warm-up, an exploration, a summary,
independent practice, and a wrap-up. This routine came directly from the
discussions that we had in Methods II. Likewise, I have similar routines for my unit
plans: students explore a topic, learn skills, summarize, and then demonstrate their

knowledge. Students begin with the concrete or numeric, then explore the concepts
in the abstract, and slowly use more and more formal language and notation. I have
also become fluent in differentiating for different learners and providing students
multiple ways of accessing and working with the content. Paradoxically, I plan more
formally now after the Hunter experience than I did before. I have found that this
has made me a stronger teacher overall.

My teaching has improved much in my time at Hunter, particularly during my
Practicum. I have become better at balancing various modes of instruction and at
moving fluently between these. At first, I felt very reticent to lecture and have
students take notes. As I have gone on in my education, I have found benefits to
direct instruction, especially when balanced and woven into the more student-
centered approaches that we were encouraged to adopt in Methods II. I appreciate
and value the hands-on, Constructivist, collaborative model that my professors have
introduced to me, and feel that it is an even more powerful tool when paired with
some skill at direct instruction. Balance is key to me in my teaching, and variety is
also important in helping all learners succeed. As I have grown as a teacher, I have
learned to use multiple modes of engaging my students, and this includes using
different tools to help me communicate.

I have also broadened my ideas about what constitutes a good assessment of my
students. At first, I often gave my students low-level exercises. As I have grown as a
teacher, I have become more adept at pushing the students to reason as well as

demonstrate discrete skills and to use those discrete skills to solve problems.
Further, I came to understand the importance of including formative assessment in
my classroom routines, not just summative. This has transformed my teaching,
helping my students take more ownership of their own learning and push
themselves. As part of this push, I have asked students higher-order questions in
class and emphasized class discussion much more over the past three years.

I have focused this year more than ever on collaboration in my classroom. To this
end, students frequently engage in discussions at their tables and with the whole
class. This creates opportunities for all students to participate, as the discussions
provide an extra chance for students to engage with the content. I have also worked
hard to create an environment where mistakes are not considered taboo. Rather,
they are to be analyzed and discussed so that the whole class can learn from them. I
often ask students who are comfortable doing so to explain their mistakes, and this
helps them feel that their work and contributions are valuable even when they are
not correct. These changes have created positive feelings in the classroom and
have helped students feel successful. I hope to continue these strategies in years to
come.

My skills as a teacher have improved greatly over my time as a Hunter student, and I
look forward to carrying the lessons I learned with me in years to come.