Teaching Philosophy
I am active in the classroom, voice bouncing through high and low notes as I read passages aloud or discuss material I find exciting. I move around the room as students work, assessing progress, mentally fitting their ideas into my bullet points for class discussion. When we come back together, I initiate the dialog between us all, asking for volunteers to share work, pointing out creative answers, encouraging students to engage in conversation with each other. While students share their ideas, I serve as the discussion leader. I guide the class by linking comments, posing questions, and encouraging students to connect the material to their own lives. When I leave the classroom I am exhausted mentally, physically, and emotionally. That is how I know I have done my job correctly. Teaching, like performance, demands that a person gives everything she is capable of giving at exactly that moment. My teaching philosophy is rooted in this idea and my belief that students deserve my best every time I step into the classroom.
A fellow teacher once told me that we might not ever know what is happening in students’ lives outside of our classrooms. The best thing we can do for our students, she said, is give them consistency because that consistency might provide the stability they may be lacking in other areas of their lives. I have taken this ethos to heart. When students walk into my classroom, they know what to expect both in terms of my attitude and learning. I provide the agenda at the beginning of each lesson in order to give students a map that shows them where we are going and why. My lessons contain the scaffolding necessary to reach the objectives I have set forth in the course and for the lesson itself. I cater to different learning styles by employing a mix of verbal, visual and tactile elements in lessons as well as different lines of questioning, opportunities for exploratory learning, individual interaction with me, small group work, and time for students to reflect on their ideas.
As a middle and high school teacher, I offer a unique perspective on higher education. Having a fundamental knowledge of how students learn and what students need in order to succeed in the classroom at a secondary level inspires the style of teaching I will employ in the college classroom, especially with underclassmen. Incoming college freshman need to be taught how to adapt their learning strategies to a new environment, one that demands self-sufficiency. In some cases, students need to be taught learning strategies in general. One way to help students is to demystify the process of learning by showing them the steps they need to take in order to achieve an end product, whether that is reading material with a focus, meaningful participation in a group setting, writing an essay, completing a project, or a creating a product.
Providing models of appropriate learning strategies and clear guidelines about classroom and work expectations needs to exist at all levels of education. Students benefit from that kind of structure and engage in learning when they receive a mix of formal and informal assessments that all provide timely feedback on student performance. Above all else, students need opportunities to contemplate course material and process it in meaningful ways both individually and with others, including the teacher. One of my favorite teaching moments was when an 8th grade student asked a question about race in relation to the book we were reading. We ended up discussing the prejudice that the book largely ignored, and the bias students encountered in their real lives. Although we did not strictly adhere to the lesson plan I had created, the discussion was an important. It not only provided my students with the opportunity to interact with the text on a personal level, but it also became a forum where students could engage in meaningful dialog about a real life issue that affected their lives on a daily basis.
While structure and consistency are the pillars of my philosophy, flexibility when teaching is also an important part of my style. In combination, these elements create a safe classroom environment in which students know the expectations they must meet but are also aware that sometimes the most important learning moments happen organically and unexpectedly. At the heart of my philosophy is the idea that my responsibility is to provide students with the opportunity to learn and students’ responsibility is to seize those opportunities. I cannot force students to learn, nor can I beg them to learn. What I can do is walk into my classroom prepared, encourage students to think in new and different ways, and be available as a resource for students. Ultimately the students must be the ones, like my 8th graders, who embrace the opportunities I present and take responsibility for their own learning.