Using My Lessons Learned the Hard Way to Inform Teaching in the 21st Century

by Dr. Howard Slepkov

It has now been five years since I last stood in front of a class of students. I have wanted to share my experiences with young people interested in their own career in the classroom. I loved being a teacher, an educator, but I didn't become an expert overnight although I thought at first it would be easy. Little did I know it would take me a lot of lessons learned the hard way how to be a successful classroom teacher. I wan ...   ...  Read more
How To
Self-Improvement
Education for Kids

Podcast episodes

  • The Problem With Discipline

    The Problem With Discipline

    13:05

    From the beginning of my career, I had a real problem with classroom control. I was afraid of my older students. It took my almost my entire career until I realized that the secret of control was not to make everything a power struggle between the student and myself but to learn to understand the world through the eyes of the students I was having difficulties with and were having their own difficulties with the school environment. The secret to finding success with students, most of the time, is thinking of them as individuals and seeing them that way and responding to them that way. So much of what we do is related to emotional learning and with that comes the ability to help students get along.

  • Robograding?

    Robograding?

    12:45

    I read the outline of an article on the idea of robograding which means using machine programmed intelligence to grade papers. It explained what robograding meant to imply and then it talked about why it is so far away from being realized. I remember when early adoption of computers in the classroom led to some believing they would eliminate teachers and I retorted that there would always be a need for teachers. Same thing applies with this concept. We can program machines to mark simple examples where there is no thinking involved, only choices. But as soon as thinking which means emotions become involved, it is much harder to do in the best interests of the students. Only a good teacher can see into the mind and thinking of a student and it is in that in between place where sometimes we have to assess fairly what a student is trying to say and show.

  • Global Education & Collaborative web-Enabled Projects

    Global Education & Collaborative web-Enabled Projects

    13:31

    One of the most important developments that came along with the creation of the World Wide Web and its successor, the Internet, was the ability to reach a global audience. In those early days that was done through email and listserves and then came first web pages / web sites and social media. Now it is easy for a parent or a teacher or a student of any age to make contact with individuals and groups of almost any variety. We are witnessing the bad side of this in so many ways, but the good side is what I am focussing on. These developments have enabled us to help one another learn about the world around us and the peoples who inhabit our planet. There is a world out there waiting for our students to find in a positive way and we can accomplish that so easily but helping them find global collaborative projects and opportunities for them to chat and interact with others like them in classrooms and schools all over the world.

  • The Science of Teaching and Learning and Applying That To Lesson Planning

    The Science of Teaching and Learning and Applying That To Lesson Planning

    16:10

    There is never an end to the positions that are being taken in various states and provinces concerning Education and far too often they are coming from a place of a lack of understanding about what we teach, how we teach and why we teach as well as how students learn and why they learn or don't learn. The latest headline is about teachers having to file their lesson plans a whole year ahead of their work so there will be an opportunity for parents to see and comment and criticize. In this podcast, I try to outline how we are now going back to where we were before I even began to teach and how that runs contrary to everything we now to be the case about success in teaching and learning. There are roles parents can play in this adventure we call school but it is not to be able to criticize and comment on lessons on a day to day basis.

  • Looking at the Factors Leading to So Much Teacher Burnout

    Looking at the Factors Leading to So Much Teacher Burnout

    17:44

    Hearing folks from every walk of life attest to the fact that they are DONE with the pandemic, or demonstrate to end all the restrictions on personal freedom, it is easy to overlook a group of people who have more than enough reasons to want the pandemic to end. Teacher by definition spend their professional careers in a very high-stress environment, under assault from all directions to demand quality as well as quantity of educational experiences. However, it is well known that teachers don't last long in their classrooms. Five years is more than enough for most of them. Why is this so and what can we do to make things easier for them?