David Gazeley's teaching philosophy combines teacher-centered and student-centered approaches. It draws from essentialism in delivering information while also utilizing aspects of progressivism, social reconstructionism, and existentialism to create technologically literate citizens. Specifically, Gazeley believes students need a base of essential technological knowledge that must be adjusted continually. He also believes in cooperative, inquiry-based learning where students solve problems collaboratively. Additionally, Gazeley's philosophy highlights socially relevant topics to stimulate higher-order thinking and applying skills to benefit society. Creativity is also encouraged through divergent thinking and the engineering design process.
David Gazeley's teaching philosophy combines teacher-centered and student-centered approaches. It draws from essentialism in delivering information while also utilizing aspects of progressivism, social reconstructionism, and existentialism to create technologically literate citizens. Specifically, Gazeley believes students need a base of essential technological knowledge that must be adjusted continually. He also believes in cooperative, inquiry-based learning where students solve problems collaboratively. Additionally, Gazeley's philosophy highlights socially relevant topics to stimulate higher-order thinking and applying skills to benefit society. Creativity is also encouraged through divergent thinking and the engineering design process.
David Gazeley's teaching philosophy combines teacher-centered and student-centered approaches. It draws from essentialism in delivering information while also utilizing aspects of progressivism, social reconstructionism, and existentialism to create technologically literate citizens. Specifically, Gazeley believes students need a base of essential technological knowledge that must be adjusted continually. He also believes in cooperative, inquiry-based learning where students solve problems collaboratively. Additionally, Gazeley's philosophy highlights socially relevant topics to stimulate higher-order thinking and applying skills to benefit society. Creativity is also encouraged through divergent thinking and the engineering design process.
Education My philosophy of education is a combination of teacher-centered and student-centered beliefs. I draw from the essentialism philosophical branch of teacher-centered information delivery, while my student-centered philosophies utilize bits of progressivism, social reconstruction, and existentialism to create technologically literate citizens. Teaching Tech Ed is an eclectic process and this is reflected in my teaching philosophy, which draws from all of the aforementioned philosophies to create an informed, creative, and technologically literate citizen. Specifically, my teacher-centered philosophy is based in the belief that information and technology are rapidly changing; therefore, students must build a base of knowledge that is essential to understand and be a part of their technological world. When Tech Ed was Industrial Arts, I would have relied on a more perennialist philosophy, delivering the unchanging, necessary information in the proper order that was needed to enter each appropriate career. This has evolved to a more essentialist slant. Students still need age old relevant information, but the nature of technology now is such, that we need to adjust what we teach on a continual basis. Tech Ed is a subject that everyone needs the same baseline information, regardless of socio-economic status; everyone uses technology, no mater how poor or disadvantaged they are. I believe life is a series of cooperative efforts and education should be cooperative in nature. The philosophy of progressivism is apparent in Tech Ed through its inquiry-based, cooperative nature where students use hands-on, true to life experiences to learn from. Students are presented with a situation or problem to solve and be challenged to seek out information, to construct hypotheses, and collaborate in order to achieve successful solutions. My students will be involved with cooperative, student-centered learning that challenges them to think about consequences, be they good or bad, in a collaborative environment. In my classroom I will use collaboration extensively to achieve my learning objectives. I believe students learn from each other when they cooperate in a common goal. During my experience with mentoring the BEST robotics team I have witnessed cooperative learning. Students are engaged with a common goal that they work in collaboration to achieve. Therefore, in my classroom, the roles of the student will be to learn, collaborate, and cooperate from each other as well as from me.
David Gazeley
EDUC 250
The social reconstructionist element of my teaching philosophy is
demonstrated in my belief that students can and will make a positive difference in society; I will highlight socially relevant curriculum that stimulates higher thinking skills. To this end, my students will learn to apply the engineering design process to create products and services that satisfy human wants and needs. They will learn to apply this skill to benefit all aspects of their lives and those of their fellow citizens. I will use leadership and cooperative learning in my classroom to achieve this goal. I have seen constructivism work in my Boy Scout troop with my scout leaders. The higher ranked boys lead and teach the lower ranked in order to increase their knowledge and skills but also to reinforce their own. Creativity is a central theme in Tech Ed; freethinking is encouraged throughout the engineering design process. Cooperative creativity is essential to the brainstorming process where group members bring forth ideas in a judgment-free environment. Often times the notion that form follows function is evident when an idea develops into a real product. The design notebook is largely an existential display. There is a formal order to the engineering notebook; however, its contents are made up from an individuals sketches and ideas that represent an their own perception of what is the answer to the challenge being faced. I believe students need to express their ideas without the worry of thinking differently; on the contrary, I encourage divergent thinking. All inventions created are the result of someone thinking differently; therefore, I will encourage students to think outside of normal conventions, to tap into their own unique creativity. I plan to incorporate these parts of educational philosophies to achieve my goal as a Tech Ed teacher, to create technologically literate citizens through the integration of STEM subjects as well as reading, writing and social studies. I will use design challenges, projects, and interactive webbased activities to facilitate thought-provoking and productive leaning.