Teaching PhIlosophy:

I want to ignite students’ minds to open and explore their own questions about the subject and how it applies to the world. I want the child to be able to go out into the world after school and be able to explore their own identity and how it connects them to the world they have to live in. With this, inspiring them to use their minds to ask the difficult questions about the world and helping them solve these questions with multiple ways and formats to think critically about the situation. I would like students to always be asking ‘why is something the way that it is’ and using those thinking skills to come to an informed conclusion in their own heads, whether or not they choose to share is up to them. However, I would like to provide a safe classroom where they can freely discuss these things and feel safe about asking these kinds of questions without fear of being judged because every child is entitled to not be judged based on the questions they are confused about. As a teacher, we are there to help them, not necessarily find answers, but find some type of solace in the conclusions they draw.
I want to inspire kids to learn and have the drive to continue learning throughout the rest of their lives. Kids pursuing life-long learning is a main goal for me because then, as a teacher, we have directly impacted the future of maybe even future educators. We will have impacted the future of these students for a future we could not reach on our own. Life-long learning ties into my previous point that, students should always be asking ‘why is something the way that it is’. Once they learn how to come to that conclusion, they can take it with them to their careers or whatever the future holds to them and challenge other peoples’ thinking with their own conclusion and potentially pass it on to even more people, thus indirectly becoming educators themselves. If we strive to foster lifelong learning in kids, overall, people will be happier, more fulfilled, keep your brain sharp, and help them succeed in whatever they decide to pursue in the future (The Many Benefits of Lifelong Learning, 2021).
I believe that all kids have a preferred learning style that should be catered to when learning anything. As people say, each child has a vastly different way of understanding and processing information than any of their peers. While I understand that this is really difficult to truly implement in the classroom, I think it is very important to at least start somewhere. I want to include every student learning style in my teaching because then the hard work is on me, rather than the student to try and figure out how to translate in something they can understand easier. I would rather have that and make their life easier because they are at school out of necessity. I would love to make it so that they are there because they want to but coming from being in school not that long ago, only certain teachers made me want to be there by including learning styles for everyone and making them realize that “Hey, just because I learn a different way than someone else, doesn’t mean I’m invalid”. Again, I hope I can incorporate all their learning styles to help them have a drive to be at school and maybe implement a way for them to easily engage their learning preference with different classes by learning how to look at other material different without feeling like I am forcing them to change their learning style.

Overall, a lot of my teaching philosophy has come from past experiences and what I do not want to happen to the students of the future that did happen to me. I am excited to continue to reflect on this teaching philosophy while adding and changing things as I pursue the world of education.

References:

waldenu. 2021. The Many Benefits of Lifelong Learning. [online] Available at: <https://www.waldenu.edu/programs/resource/the-many-benefits-of-lifelong-learning> [Accessed 16 May 2021].