My Teaching Philosophy
Every person is born with the innate ability to learn. Though there may be differences in the areas of strengths between each individual’s capability to collect, process, and apply information through the modalities of visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile, everyone can learn.
Our human potential to survive and thrive is based on the fact that we are all learning organisms. As we extend ourselves to thriving in any environment, situation, or condition, we must embrace the role of being educated in and outside of school. Learning is that process to acquire the knowledge and skills, or tools, of any education. For education is nothing more than the acquiring of such tools to use and produce ones’ works of fruitfulness for oneself, family, and society.
As a teacher, an educator, it is my role to create an environment, orchestrate an experience, and facilitate the learning process of the learner. This means providing the student with enriched opportunities to gain insight and skills to produce.
My teaching approach is founded on the method of inquiry, and applying the “art of questioning.” This approach is what I use to teach the learner and help the learner to develop the ability to question within him or herself. Whether it is from the student, or I, questioning is the foundation to developing the skill to build knowledge and reason. The root word in the term question is “quest,” and quest means to take a journey. When we question, we force the mind to take a journey to find ideas and solutions that will address problems or challenges faced.
From my method of teaching, the environment and experience I have established for my students require them to research and investigate information, to discover and explore concepts, and to synthesize and create from what they have learned in this complete process. This also requires me to aid students in developing their skills in thinking, for which a great emphasis is on the students’ development of metacognition, the mental awareness and control of one’s own thinking regardless if the focus is on personal socio-emotional conditions or solving problems of any nature.
As human beings, our learning begins and ends with our thinking. If I am to make a significant impact in my students’ lives in helping them to be true lifelong learners, then I must teach them to think.
To cultivate empowering learning experiences, students must work together to share and cooperate to build fluency in collaboration, communication, creativity, and problem-solving. Much application to learning in my classroom reflects this understanding.
To cultivate empowering learning experiences, it is also important to start with what students know because each person has a constant bank of experiences from which they may have learned something. All students have that base of knowledge to which connections of concepts can be establish to the learning of something new. It is the job of the teacher to expose and present these moments to the student. Moments such as these elicit the “Aha” moments. This is why I have students to use self-awareness. As I often tell them, “start with what you know.”
This is also the reason why I call all my classes the “Thinking Class” and not math class. Learning cannot be compartmentalized if one is trying to evoke true understanding of concepts or principles. If students use all they know from any life experience, it will help them to make connections and build their knowledge and conceptual knowledge base. A result of such an action reinforces the memory, which is due to the significant meaning students have from their past, whereby the bonding of that significance is added to the new information.
My method of teaching offers my students the opportunity to learn how to think logically and critically about all that they are exposed to and this is where the problem solver and innovator inside of the students are awakened.
