9/2/2010 Quotes, Perspective on Teaching, and Neo-Socratic Method

September 2, 2010
Quotes, Perspective on Teaching, and Neo-Socratic Method:
As a preschool teacher I see myself in a position to not only “teach” children but to learn from them as well. I love the moments where I can “see” the light bulb above their heads turn on, when they got whatever they were trying to do. It is true that my response to each child and what they are doing or making can affect them in a profound way - it could be a look, an action, the tone in which I speak, and/or what I say.
I’ll never forget during a third grade conference my teacher told my dad, “Susan is average; she’ll always be a “C” student.” When the teacher said this I was happy because no matter how hard I studied I would get “B” and “C” grades. I guess I had hoped my dad would stop harping on me about my grades now that a teacher told him that; well I was surely wrong. My dad refused to believe the teacher and set out to prove her wrong. I had to get up an hour earlier each school day to do vocabulary words from the dictionary, after school I had a longer study session, and some weekends I went with my dad to his office and did reports. Well, it paid off in the long run because my grades did improve.
I’d like to go one step further and say that it is not only the children that I “teach” but also educate their family (and they educate me too). Wow, I can’t believe I just said that! Let me tell you why. When I first began going down this path of becoming a teacher the only thing I didn’t want to do was interact with the parents – just the thought alone caused high anxiety within me. Well I got over that in my first year of teaching and I’ve come to not only enjoy the children but their families too. I enjoy the friendships that can occur, the morning and afternoon brief exchanges with families, and I believe that by developing a partnership with families the children do benefit by it.

I was introduced to the Neo-Socratic Method by Jeanne Iorio in one of her other classes. I do have to say that it made me question more than ever about things that have to do with being a teacher, what I think, and what I do. I work with Val (who is also in our class) and we have been able to question many things that used to occur in our classroom since taking Jeanne’s class. Once we started to vocalize our thoughts to each other, we tried to figure out how to implement them, then as a team we went to our director and “argued” our case, and then (almost every time) we were able to put it into action. If it weren’t for learning the Neo-Socratic Method I may have continued to be silent.
Let me give you an example so that you might understand what I’m saying. Where I work we have many rules (maybe too many), together Val and I went through the invisible list of rules that we give to the children and picked the ones we wanted to cross off, one of them being that teachers only put water in the sandbox. We question this. Why couldn’t the children do it themselves? They would be exercising their fine motor skills by turning on the faucet as well as developing their eye-hand coordination, the children would also be measuring the water content in the container as well as balancing the water from not spilling while walking, they would be experimenting how to make wet sand and what consistency they would want it and how much water to use or not use, use their creativity and imagination, and actually the list of positive learning experiences could go on and on. But I think I made my point here and yes our director agreed that we can let the children get their own water for the sandbox. I continue to move ahead with my new way of learning. I look forward to learning more in this class.