Two Characteristics of the Novice Teacher

Characteristic 3 of the Novice Teacher pertains to the ethical and moral duties we have as educators. It is of great importance that every classroom has an environment that exudes professionalism, and makes our students feel that they will be treated in a fair way. We must also integrate these values into our teaching in order to transfer these values onto our students. I feel that the best example of this characteristic in my teaching is the Holocaust unit I recently taught in my 11th grade class. In this unit, I asked students to understand that the eleven million who were persecuted should not be thought of as a number, but remembered as individuals who had their lives changed forever by the events of the Holocaust. To encourage my students to learn more about different people affected, I had my students make "passports" that contained a picture of a victim of the Holocaust and their birth date, country of origin, and personal history up until the 1940s. After this unit I gave my students more information on these victims, if they lived, and what their lives were like after liberation. My students truly got a understanding of how dangerous it is to dehumanize others, and how important it is to look at individual lives.

Characteristic 6 requires the novice teacher to show an in depth knowledge of the content that he or she will be teaching. This characteristic is particularly important for secondary educators, who must have a great deal of knowledge of content. As I am a social studies teacher, I feel that it is most important to show my knowledge of history. My best example of content knowledge would be a analytical paper I wrote about the Renaissance era literature for my Italian history class. In this analysis, I discussed how the culture of Italy in this era had an enormous influence on the presence of women in literature. This essay is a wonderful example of the content knowledge I have that is require in a social studies classroom.