Over the summer, I tutored a number of middle school students that were on the summer program. This was a perfect opportunity for me to employ teaching and learning philosophy. The class was made up of 14 students, 8 boys and 6 girls. 7 students were ELS students and 1 of them had ADHD. Before commencing my lesson, I made a lesson plan which included the topic to be covered, the teaching strategy, activities to be conducted and the assessment. My lessons begun by conducting pre-assessments where I got to know the level of understanding of the students about the topic of study. This was in line with the progressivism philosophy, which posits that students are not blank slates but rather individuals with prior knowledge based on their experiences.
During the lesson, I employed a number of activities such as discussions and asking of questions; activities that made the classroom highly interactive. The students seemed to enjoy the classroom as they raised questions when they did not understand a concept and answered the questions that I asked them. I took care of the needs of the ESL students by making sure I rephrased questions in a language that they could easily understand. During the lesson, I made use of the interactive white board where some of the concepts that I was teaching were displayed in a beautiful and colorful way for the understanding of the students. This proved to be very effective methods as the students were keen and very attentive.
At the end of the program, I issued assessments, which were aimed assessing their level of learning of the topic. The results of the assessments indicated a highly successful program as most of the students obtained the minimal pass mark of 85%.
