Heather; The Teacher

Who Am I?

My name is Heather Avrech.  I am a 33 years old and mommy to two beautiful little girls (ages 3 and 6) and a wife to my amazing husband, Aaron.

Image by Bre Thurston Photography

Additionally, I am a teacher.  I started my teaching career, in 2007, as a physical education teacher for Rhythm and Moves where I taught K-8th grade.

I have always been interested in sports, the human body, nutrition and physical education.  As well as having a Bachelors of Science in Sports Management with a specialization in health and wellness, I also hold multiple personal training and nutrition certifications.  Currently, I teach in the form of personal training at Retro Fitness to help members reach and maintain their health and fitness goals.

In addition to teaching physical education, I have also taught math, art, public speaking and even taught a "Create your Own Business" course in a middle school summer program.

As a teacher, I believe myself to be creative, fun, challenging and invested.  I create lessons and unit plans that are creative and interactive that engage students in a way that creates a fun academic environment.  I am also heavily invested in my students.  I care for each and every one of them; not only with academic aspirations but also in real life.  I teach my students with a goal for them to have explicit understanding of the material.  I not only want them to understand the material but I want them to be able to transfer that knowledge into real life situations and in order to do so, the material learned must become meaningful and authentic for each and every student.

How do I Meet the Needs of Diverse Learners in the Classroom?

In order to meet the needs of every learner in my classroom, I create a classroom and lessons that allow all types of learners to participate, learn and have fun.  I utilize differentiated learning strategies that include "whole brain teaching" as well as G.L.A.D. (Guided Language Acquisition Design) strategies such as pictoral charts to aid English Language Leaners.  Furthermore, in regards to differentiated instruction for five-learner profiles, assessment will also differentiate to aid each child to reach success and full understanding of the material.

How Does my Personality Effect my Relationship with Students?

I believe myself to be, and have been told, that I have an outgoing personality and am easily approachable.  I am of accepting nature and many people come to me in confidence as they know they can trust me.  These personality traits, I believe, allow me to have a close relationship with my students in the classroom.  I, personally, want my classroom to feel like a family rather than a leader (teacher) vs. students.  This family feel in the classroom allows students to feel safe and, in my opinion, creates a better learning environment for everyone in the classroom.

After taking the personality test my results are as follows:

The MMDI thinks your personality is closest to the ISFP stereotype and 2nd closest to ESFJ. If your closest personality type is ISFP then you have some deeply-held values that, even though your life may be somewhat unstructured, direct the things that you do and say. You probably take a caring and sensitive approach to others, more so than may be apparent to others because you showing your feelings in acts of kindness rather than in direct statements. You probably have a strong sense of the type of lifestyle you enjoy, which you want to maintain.

Your preference for sensing means you like to deal with reality, with facts, tangible outcomes, and specific information. You also use intuition, though to a lesser degree. It looks at possibilities, at hidden potential, new ways of doing things, or what is not yet known.

Your preference for Feeling means you use subjective values, taking a more personal, subjective view as a participant, and tending to appreciate the important things in life. You also using Thinking, but to a lesser degree. Thinking involves using objective principles, taking a detached, objective view as an onlooker, and tending to analyse or see inconsistencies.

Your results suggest you like a balance between the two - using some judgment, which structures and controls life, makes decisions and sticks to them, and some perception, which goes with the flow, and is more flexible and spontaneous. 

Again, I feel these results further illustrate how my personality effects my teaching style and in turn, my relationship with my students.  I want my students to relate the information they learn to tangible real life situations which is a sensing personality trait that I very heavily lean toward.  Additionally, as I stated before taking the personality exam, I have a caring nature, sensitive approach to others, and demonstrate kindness which allows students to feel safe with me and my classroom.

How Will my Teaching and Learning Style Affect your Teaching and my Students Abilities to be Successful?

I took the following 3 tests in regards to my teaching and learning styles:

Teaching and Learning Styles

Grasha's Teaching Style Inventory

Grasha's Learning Style Inventory

And here are my results.

For the first test (teaching and learning styles) my results are as pictured:

Click to Enlarge

These test results do not, in the least, surprise me one bit!  I scored very high as a sensory learner and low as an intuitive learner.   Below illustrates the differences between the two types of learners (info pulled from: http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ILSdir/styles.htm )

SENSING AND INTUITIVE LEARNERS

• Sensing learners tend to like learning facts, intuitive learners often prefer discovering possibilities and relationships.
• Sensors often like solving problems by well-established methods and dislike complications and surprises; intuitors like innovation and dislike repetition. Sensors are more likely than intuitors to resent being tested on material that has not been explicitly covered in class.
• Sensors tend to be patient with details and good at memorizing facts and doing hands-on (laboratory) work; intuitors may be better at grasping new concepts and are often more comfortable than sensors with abstractions and mathematical formulations.
• Sensors tend to be more practical and careful than intuitors; intuitors tend to work faster and to be more innovative than sensors.
• Sensors don't like courses that have no apparent connection to the real world; intuitors don't like "plug-and-chug" courses that involve a lot of memorization and routine calculations.

Everybody is sensing sometimes and intuitive sometimes. Your preference for one or the other may be strong, moderate, or mild. To be effective as a learner and problem solver, you need to be able to function both ways. If you overemphasize intuition, you may miss important details or make careless mistakes in calculations or hands-on work; if you overemphasize sensing, you may rely too much on memorization and familiar methods and not concentrate enough on understanding and innovative thinking.

How can sensing learners help themselves?

Sensors remember and understand information best if they can see how it connects to the real world. If you are in a class where most of the material is abstract and theoretical, you may have difficulty. Ask your instructor for specific examples of concepts and procedures, and find out how the concepts apply in practice. If the teacher does not provide enough specifics, try to find some in your course text or other references or by brainstorming with friends or classmates.

As I stated above in describing myself as a teacher, I said how my goal is to teach toward explicit understanding.  I teach for my students to grasp the material in a meaningful way in which they can relate it to real life situations.  This 100% demonstrates my heavy lean towards the sensing learner.

The results for my Grasha's Teaching Style Survey are below:

Click to Enlarge

And finally my results for Grasha's Learning Style Survey, my results are as follows:

Click to Enlarge

I believe that my results from the above surveys illustrate why I teach the way I do.  First and foremost, as a learner, I lean very much toward the sensing side of learning in which I like concepts to have real world applications.  And that concept is one of my big goals for all my students; to have explicit understanding of the material learned.  I want my students to take the information they have learned and make it meaningful and be able to transfer it to real life situations.

Additionally, as the test results show above, my teaching style shows high levels of formal authority, personal model, facilitator and delegator and moderate as "expert".  I find this to be true to my teaching style as I aim to differentiate instruction as to allow all learners in the classroom to do well no matter what their learning style.  

Overall, I truly have a passion for teaching and love what I do.  I strive to create a successful classroom utilizing open communication, differentiated instruction and provide both an educational and personal challenge for students while making content relatable and meaningful.