Students’ Best Interest
What does it mean to have the students’ best interests in mind?
Having the students’ best interest in mind was the advice I got from teachers I admired when I was going into my student teaching. It sounded like simple enough advice and I tried to employ it right away, but found it more complex than I thought. What’s best for them? How can I teach so that they’ll be engaged?
With a lot of trial and error I came to realize that having the students’ best interest in mind is similar to student-centered teaching. This means adapting my teaching style to their learning style. Shifting the focus from me to them. The class is not centered around what I want to do. It’s getting through the curriculum and adhering to the standards and giving the students a voice in what they want to learn. Having their best interest in mind means adjusting what I think is best for them to what is actually best for them.
For example, I might think that they need to answer 20 questions in the textbook every night and during every class period. It gets them through the material. The questions are standards-ready. It’s easy for me. They’ll learn the material and ace the quizzes and tests. They’ll be complaisant and obeisant. They learn what is already known. Nothing wrong with that. Is that actually what is best for them?
It becomes problematic when textbook problems are the only thing that pupils do in class. When students continue in this routine, they get really good at answering questions from a book. They master level one in Bloom’s Taxonomy and don’t practice the higher order thinking skills–levels 4, 5, and 6. The knowledge level doesn’t engage their minds to be creative and innovative. Creativity and innovation take practice. Creativity and innovation need blessing and encouragement. The knowledge level is necessary for a foundation, but at some point students need to get beyond that to do something extraordinary.
Students’ best interest to me means student-centered. It means teaching in a way that engages them. It means creating an environment where innovation and insight can thrive. It means empowering them to build up their own knowledge and equipping them to evaluate, synthesize, and analyze it in a learning environment. They can get the knowledge at home on the web. They need the community of the classroom to make sense of it. They sharpen each other without me saying anything (except to keep the peace).
Their best interest=I listen more.
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