NICK PESTONE - TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
From an early age, I began teaching life skills such as citizenship and perseverance as a camp counselor, and I never looked back. At this stage in my career, I have fine-tuned my skills, and I believe my accomplishments truly demonstrate my well-rounded acumen for the profession. In addition, I possess a growth mindset and progressive ideology that will continue to strengthen my pedagogy as the years go on.
My educational beliefs are anchored in engagement, community, diversity, leadership, and 21st century skills. Some of my recent accomplishments in the classroom highlight these beliefs:
• I seek to create life-long learners by constructing authentic experiences in which students are challenged to deconstruct, evaluate, and redesign conclusions through project-based learning. My students frequently participate in extensive, critical-thinking based performance tasks through the use of 2.0 tools. Recent highlights include:
1. An interdisciplinary debate that was thematically linked to our reading class, but had significant implications for several refugees in Sudan.
2. Multiple documentarian projects where groups of students utilized iMovie to create extended novel endings, talk shows, mini-documentaries, and mock criminal trials, all based on novels from Reading class.
3. A re-interpretation of John Hunter's World Peace Game, a game-based learning experience that requires students to use their conditional knowledge about the geography of the USA and apply it to solve complex problems, using 21st century research and collaboration skills.
• I am a multi-tiered technological facilitator for:
1. My students! Students use our blog to partake in interdisciplinary assignments within an ISTE based framework which centers around collaborative and constructivist discourse.
2. Parents! My website and blog, and their accompanying tutorial videos and resources make classroom experiences transparent, and give a new definition to parent-student-teacher communication. My website averages between 1,000 -2,000 hits a week.
3. Colleagues! I am a level 1 (soon to be level 2) Google Certified Educator. I have led multiple teacher workshops in order to assist the implementation of tech-based initiatives (Google Suite, Elmo, Mimio boards, Weebly, Storyboard That, Weebly Blogs, and more.)
• I developed a curriculum model for Social Studies which teaches students to interpret human nature through a scaffolded version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs. Through the use of social experiments, my students build an understanding of “why humans do the things they do” in order to process the often heavy and complicated nature of the 5th grade social studies curriculum.
• I analyze district data and design instruction to target identified areas of need (I recently developed and implemented multiple project-based performance tasks aimed at alleviating designated ELA MCAS weaknesses. (My "Battle of the Books" moved students to not just understand, but defend literary elements like never before. In addition, my "Storyboard That" mini graphic novel unit roused students to create thrilling connections between text, prose, and graphic sources).
• I set the bar high for all of my students (my “Resident Expert” projects push students to explore areas of interest and create products that make a lasting impact, such as one student whose actions led to her winning the Braintree Community Inclusion Award in 2016).
From an early age, I began teaching life skills such as citizenship and perseverance as a camp counselor, and I never looked back. At this stage in my career, I have fine-tuned my skills, and I believe my accomplishments truly demonstrate my well-rounded acumen for the profession. In addition, I possess a growth mindset and progressive ideology that will continue to strengthen my pedagogy as the years go on.
My educational beliefs are anchored in engagement, community, diversity, leadership, and 21st century skills. Some of my recent accomplishments in the classroom highlight these beliefs:
• I seek to create life-long learners by constructing authentic experiences in which students are challenged to deconstruct, evaluate, and redesign conclusions through project-based learning. My students frequently participate in extensive, critical-thinking based performance tasks through the use of 2.0 tools. Recent highlights include:
1. An interdisciplinary debate that was thematically linked to our reading class, but had significant implications for several refugees in Sudan.
2. Multiple documentarian projects where groups of students utilized iMovie to create extended novel endings, talk shows, mini-documentaries, and mock criminal trials, all based on novels from Reading class.
3. A re-interpretation of John Hunter's World Peace Game, a game-based learning experience that requires students to use their conditional knowledge about the geography of the USA and apply it to solve complex problems, using 21st century research and collaboration skills.
• I am a multi-tiered technological facilitator for:
1. My students! Students use our blog to partake in interdisciplinary assignments within an ISTE based framework which centers around collaborative and constructivist discourse.
2. Parents! My website and blog, and their accompanying tutorial videos and resources make classroom experiences transparent, and give a new definition to parent-student-teacher communication. My website averages between 1,000 -2,000 hits a week.
3. Colleagues! I am a level 1 (soon to be level 2) Google Certified Educator. I have led multiple teacher workshops in order to assist the implementation of tech-based initiatives (Google Suite, Elmo, Mimio boards, Weebly, Storyboard That, Weebly Blogs, and more.)
• I developed a curriculum model for Social Studies which teaches students to interpret human nature through a scaffolded version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs. Through the use of social experiments, my students build an understanding of “why humans do the things they do” in order to process the often heavy and complicated nature of the 5th grade social studies curriculum.
• I analyze district data and design instruction to target identified areas of need (I recently developed and implemented multiple project-based performance tasks aimed at alleviating designated ELA MCAS weaknesses. (My "Battle of the Books" moved students to not just understand, but defend literary elements like never before. In addition, my "Storyboard That" mini graphic novel unit roused students to create thrilling connections between text, prose, and graphic sources).
• I set the bar high for all of my students (my “Resident Expert” projects push students to explore areas of interest and create products that make a lasting impact, such as one student whose actions led to her winning the Braintree Community Inclusion Award in 2016).