Teaching Philosophy

1. Teaching Approach

I maintain high standards and demonstrate high expectations for myself and all students, regardless of ethnicity, cultural and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Students learn more when they are challenged by teachers who have high expectations for them, encourage them to identify problems, involve them in collaborative activities, and accelerate their learning (Burris & Welner, 2005). “…involve young people in novel problem-solving activities. They ask open-ended questions requiring students to use their judgment and form opinions. They choose activities where students must use analytic skills, evaluate, and make connections. They expect students to conduct research, complete their homework, and manage their time effectively”.

• I have always aimed for the highest standards for my own work and of the students I teach. This has always been reflected in a ‘never say die’ attitude in my work. This was reflected in the training of the Year 9 Classroom Music student’s preparation and performance for the ‘R U OK’ day in September. With very limited time to rehearse with this group, the students worked collaboratively to present a most effective performance to the rest of the school community.
• I believe that music educators fall broadly into two approaches: Inclusive and Elitist. The first approach uses inclusion as a point of connection with the broader curriculum, in turn inspiring the learner to become an autonomous learner in their musical studies. Through this process they encourage and equip others, in effect, they are culture changers. Through this process more learners are engaged and the curriculum becomes truly inclusive, a powerfully transformative educational engine. Excellence is achieved as a by-product of the student becoming a dynamic life-long learner, and impacting those around them. This is the position to which I adhere as an educator. The ‘student successes’ page of my website, I believe, provides some very notable examples of this https://grantfurneaux.com/student-successes/. The second uses a standard as a reference point, where the curriculum becomes, in effect, a ‘weeding out’ process of those who are deemed not ready or capable of reaching a pre-determined standard. This approach is characterised by a program that has many learners commence their musical journey, but only a few top level students complete it. I find this approach inconsistent with effective inclusional educational strategies, and counterproductive in producing a dynamic musical culture within a school.
• I have always set myself the highest standards for my own work, and strive to achieve these within the day-to-day context of a busy work environment. This includes dressing professionally and addressing those around me, including students, with courtesy and respect.
• I believe that the setting of benchmarks is a key factor in determining success. Therefore, for the student learner, exemplars and assessment criteria and rubrics are an important asset to every student, which, carefully constructed with a connective classroom environment and a few key skills in mind, add to the average student’s ability to create outstanding creative work of their own. In the ‘Year 7 Music Technology (Garageband) composition’ common assessment task, (October 2015), I utilised these vehicles to create a framework where some outstanding original work was delivered by students.

Show students you care by getting to know their individual needs and strengths and sharing their concerns, hopes, and dreams.

Students tend to want to participate and do their best when a teacher is nurturing and caring. Nel Noddings (1995) advocates that when society around us concentrates on materialistic messages, “we should care more genuinely for our children and teach them to care” (p. 24). Of course we want academic achievement for our students, she notes, but “we will not achieve even that unless our children believe they themselves are cared for and learn to care for others” (p. 24).

Understand students’ home cultures to better comprehend their behaviour in and out of the classroom.

Educators must understand and respect the many different ways of being a parent and expressing concern about the education of one’s children. Parental involvement is well established as being correlated with student academic achievement (Epstein, 2005).

Encourage active participation of parents or guardians.

Parents and guardians are a child’s first teachers, but they are not always aware of the ways in which they mould children’s language development and communication skills. Children learn their language at home; the more interaction and communication they have at home, the more children learn. Teachers can support this crucial role by sharing information about the link between home communication and children’s learning. Teachers can assist parents in understanding the expectations of the school and their classroom as they elicit from parents their own expectations of teachers and students. Teachers also can suggest ways in which parents might converse more often with their children to prepare them for communication in the classroom. Parents may not be aware of how they support their children’s academic efforts when they discuss the importance of education and take them to informal educational resources in the community.

• Wherever I have had the opportunity at my time at GWSC, I have taken the opportunity to communicate with parents about a range of issues in relation to their children’s work. I have found the parental body to be most appreciate of the time, effort and support that their children have received.

• Outside of GWSC, I maintain strong connections with parents of students that I have taught, or teach currently. Parents love the opportunity to connect with their child’s learning. Within the appropriate contexts, the educational opportunities are enhanced. This includes the following:

1. Parents of AYC (Australian Youth Choir) members, ranging in age from 8-12 years, rehearsing in St. Paul’s Anglican Church, Frankston, on Monday nights, where I am the venue manager, as well as assistant conductor and accompanist.
2. VCE Music Students, whose supportive parents drive them to concerts, lessons, workshops and events, and love to have their efforts in supporting their children valued and recognised.

c. Parents of Music Students that have been involved in musicals and tours that I have produced in the past. Communicating to these parents the life changing experiences that these opportunities provide

d. Parents of boys and girls that I have coached in soccer. The most united group of parents I built also worked in harmony with the players, producing an FFV premiership for the team in 2008. The value and impact of an effectively networked team of students/parents/teachers cannot be underestimated.

Tap into students’ backgrounds to enhance learning

Students’ self-esteem and motivation are enhanced when teachers elicit their experiences in classroom discussions and validate what they have to say. Young people become more engaged in lessons when they are brought into the initial dialogue by being asked what they know about the topic and what they want to know. If their questions are written down and used to form a guide for inquiry into the topic, students are far more likely to be interested in doing further research than if the questions simply come out of a text. The teacher also obtains a better understanding of students’ previous knowledge about a subject—a pre-assessment, as it were—that can guide the planning of the subsequent lesson. I have done this effectively already at GWSC with the year 9 Music Elective unit on ‘temperament and effective Practise’. Some students from the class have said that this has been the most insightful music classes of their entire Secondary Schooling.

Use cooperative learning strategies.

Teachers need to give students time to get to know each other and to find that they share common ground, common problems, and common feelings. One way to break down artificial barriers between students is to encourage them to participate in a small group over an extended period of time, collaborating on a shared activity with a shared goal that can only be achieved by working together. Children who have an opportunity to work in cooperative learning groups with fellow students of other races and ethnicities get to know those students as real people rather than as stereotypes. As students learn together and get to know one another, mutual respect and friendships can develop. I have found this to be a key feature of the group work undertaken by students at GWSC.

Create culturally compatible learning environments.

Research has shown that students learn more when their classrooms are compatible with their own cultural and linguistic experience (Au, 1980; Jordan, 1984, 1985, 1995; National Coalition of Advocates for Students, 1988; Saville-Troike, 1978; Trueba & Delgado- Gaitan, 1985). When the norms of interaction and communication in a classroom are very different from those to which students have been accustomed, they may experience confusion and anxiety, be unable to attend to learning, and not know how to appropriately seek the teacher’s attention or participate in discussions. By acknowledging students’ cultural norms and expectations concerning communication and social interaction, teachers can appropriately guide student participation in instructional activities.

Zeichner (1992) has summarized the extensive literature that describes successful teaching approaches for diverse populations. From his review, he distilled 12 key elements for effective teaching for ethnic- and language-minority students.

+ Teachers have a clear sense of their own ethnic and cultural identities.
+ Teachers communicate high expectations for the success of all students and a belief that all students can succeed.
+ Teachers are personally committed to achieving equity for all students and believe that they are capable of making a difference in their students’ learning.
+Teachers have developed a bond with their students and cease seeing their students as “the other.”
+ Schools provide an academically challenging curriculum that includes attention to the development of higher-level cognitive skills.
+ Instruction focuses on students’ creation of meaning about content in an interactive and collaborative learning environment.
+ Teachers help students see learning tasks as meaningful.
Curricula include the contributions and perspectives of the different ethnocultural groups that compose the society.

+ Teachers provide a “scaffolding” that links the academically challenging curriculum to the cultural resources that students bring to school.
+ Teachers explicitly teach students the culture of the school and seek to maintain students’ sense of ethnocultural pride and identity.