An interview with Dr. Faulkner-Beitzel
What are the three most important reasons to being a teacher?
I have been in education for nineteen years as a teacher, coach, and school administrator. I would like to return to teaching to 1) be able to provide more direct instruction to students and teachers in technology integration, 2) be a part of a student’s life to hopefully make a difference, and 3) to stay professionally motivated and inspired in education through the feeling of community an active school building provides.
How much do you want to know about your students to be helpful?
For me to be helpful to students I most definitely need to develop a trusting relationship. For that reason, I want to know as much about my students as possible, both as a learner, but also about each of them as individual people.
What three things do you most want to know about your students?
The three things I most want to know about my students are 1) their hopes and dreams, 2) how I can help them reach their aspirations, and 3) how I can best provide them instruction to fill in any learning gaps to better propel them to academic success
What do you need to know to begin lesson planning?
To prepare an engaging and effective lesson plan I first need to know what the learning purpose is for the lesson. Is it to meet an academic standard? Is it to build a skill? Is it to provide individual instruction for students’ interests?
What four components are in the plan?
The four most important components in an effective lesson plan include 1) the lesson’s objective, 2) an engaging lesson starter to hook students’ interests, 3) a mini-lesson to ensure all students are on the same page academically, and 4) an exit strategy to provide me the data needed to determine if students have mastered the topic or I need to re-teach, remediate, or better differentiate in the next day’s lesson.
How do you want to influence your student’s lives?
The ways in which I would hope to influence the lives of my students would be to ensure that I am there for them, no matter what. I would like to provide them the skills to be successful, the confidence to keep trying and the desire to learn more and more. Mostly, I would hope to provide children an education where they get the freedom to understand the world and its inequities and feel so moved to make a difference.
What core teaching strategies to you use?
My instructional philosophy is grounded in growth mindset empowering students to achieve. Two areas in which I embed this philosophy is in letting students know that mistakes are opportunities to learn and feedback is a gift that should be taken with acceptance. The strategies I use to support these ideas are 1) to provide process praise and critique through specifics and 2) normalize mistakes. More specifically I like to use “ask three before me”, and “open-ended questions” through discussions and reflective journaling.
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