My Teaching Philosophy

My perception of eduction is based on the premise that a teacher's main purpose is to help students excel and succeed. I want students to enjoy learning, and ignite a passion for knowledge that follows them throughout life. As teachers, we have to incorporate a greater variety of ways to instruct besides direct instruction, among these are peer tutoring, cooperative learning, and discovery learning. Bringing tactile experiences into the classroom is a technique I wish to explore, especially as a social studies teacher. I do not agree with teaching a curriculum geared totally towards Western culture. Such a mode of education can be seen as outdated due to the emergence of an ever-changing globally connected society. Learning has to be culturally diverse, and not just because it is politically correct. The fact is that our classrooms are culturally diverse. Learning should reflect who the learner is and become a tool to facilitate self-realization. Students should understand our globalized world better because it will be up to them to solve problems that threaten our interconnected world. Understanding different cultures, and how society has arrived to this point will be important to our future students.

My learning process is based on determining various ways to motivate students to become self-regulated and responsible for their learning. I want to encourage students to constantly assess how an activity is helping them gain understanding, while concomitantly incorporating technology. When students arrive at school from their homes, we as teachers are competing for their attention with televisions, games, cell phones, and internet. In the past, schools and classrooms may had been a more captivating place, but now we need to find more ways to engage the "net generation." Students need more technology, whether it be enhancing their computer skills with discovery learning and inquiry lessons or keeping their focus with SMARTboards and computers activities. I keep a list of web 2.0 tools that have been touted as optimal mediums for learning with technology. Preparing students for tomorrow and the technological world is a goal in which I wish to implement in my lesson planning.

Teaching is a science, and we as teachers must be able to think, act, and instruct scientifically. Our instructional decisions have to be based on empirically driven data that is well documented and proven to work effectively. We have to understand more thoroughly how the brain operates, and more importantly how the brain thinks. A classroom should be viewed as a laboratory where the experiment of learning is taking place, and if knowledge is not being attained, then other modes of instruction should be exhausted to make our experiment successful. Using various strategies to enhance memory, organization, and higher-order thinking should be the goals of our scientific experiment. Making students a part of our learning experiment is also in my tenets. They should understand the techniques that increases their brain power, and make each and ever learner a scientist in their own worlds.