My teaching philosophy is heavily influenced by two basic ideas: (1) all learning must be meaningful, and (2) educational growth for students and teachers alike must involve making mistakes and taking calculated risks to find palpable success. These two basic ideas stem from my 8 years as a professional educator and are heavily influenced by the first 5 years as a teacher of students with learning disorders.
I aspire for all lessons to demonstrate a meaningful skill that can connect to the world outside of the classroom. A class lesson on Shakespeare’s sonnets would not be successful if the goal was merely to memorize the 14 lines and recite them. My experience is students are more motivated to risk the effort to succeed if they can see it as a useful skill. Teaching the importance of skillful public speaking along side of Shakespeare and its application in various forms from job interviews to resolving personal conflict bridges the gap between the purely academic to the purposeful.
Differentiated learning plays a large role in my classroom. Lessons are planned to target specific skills for greater understanding. I see myself as a guide through the journey to knowledge, but not the path. The student and their inherent individuality is the path. When teaching plot devices and structure one student might do very well on a criterion-referenced assessment that include pen and paper tasks, but I find this to limit a student who would best be able to demonstrate their knowledge by illustrating a children’s story.
Much of my philosophy comes from seeing the frustration of bright and capable students. I believe a classroom must be constructed so that student feels that it is a safe place to make mistakes and learn from failing rather than be stigmatized. In my dyslexia intervention I often had students track their own progress so that they could see their progress and realize that what appeared to be a setback was actually growth. One such example is having the students graph their fluency assessments in various mediums. This visual and tactile combination made it the concept of growth more concrete when they came up against a roadblock such as growth in difficulty but not in rate. Ultimately, I believe that ipsative assessment is essential in developing a life-long learner that trusts himself or herself to acquire knowledge beyond that of the classroom.
Becoming an effective teacher is a never-ending growth process that requires an open-mindedness and drive in the everyday classroom. When self-evaluating my own process I often speak with former students to obtain anecdotal evidence of what they found useful in the classroom. I am often surprised with the subject matter or skill they have come away with and how they see its influence in their everyday life. The variance of answers give me fulfillment that my class has offered more than an understanding of literary devices or increased reading ability, but a broader and more critical look of the world at large.
