Motivation in Education

  Reliability is a very important, though often overlooked aspect of teaching. Reliability ensures that when students are given assignments, the assignments are accurate- meaning free from bias and able to be replicated. Strong reliability also helps assessment reliability. An example of the importance of reliability comes from one of my favorite movies- Freaky Friday. In that movie, Anna’s teacher, Mr. Bates, is seen as unfair, which we later find out is because of her mom not going out with him in high school.   However, his unfair teaching and grading practices indicate that at the core, his assessments are unreliable.   There are many signs of his unreliable assessments throughout the movie.  First (and again, a very overlooked aspect of reliability), is the fact that he is the only scorer for his students. Yes, he is the teacher, but it is obvious that him being the only person to rate his students’ performance leads to bias in his grading. For example, w...

Since the start of my teaching career, the debate between discovery learning and direct instruction has been very present. In my undergrad, we were taught about direct instruction solely as a way to instruct students with disabilities. It was not until I started using direct instruction programs myself that I started to see the holes in using direct instruction only. Though it was very effective in filling gaps, it did not allow students to think critically or connect it to their everyday lives. As a result, my overall opinion of the discovery learning versus direct instruction debate is that discovery learning can not be left out of teaching students with learning disabilities.  The last two years of teaching with a direct instruction curriculum, I have seen a lot of boredom when it comes to my students’ learning. However, that is not the biggest issue that I have seen when it comes to implementing direct instruction.  There were many times when students were repeating ba...