My Personal Philosophy Of Teaching

Teaching is not a career for everyone. To be a teacher, one must exhibit patience, passion, and dedication to the craft. If you find that you do not have these three qualities, then you need to rethink becoming an educator. Teaching young minds is not to be taken lightly, as a teacher you are holding a tremendous power over a child’s life. You can make or break your student. Life as a teacher is full of challenges, frustrations, and responsibilities. But at the end of the day, knowing that you made a difference on each of your students’ life makes it very rewarding.

My personal goal in my classroom is to help each child discover their individual gifts and talents and to reach their full potential. Gaining necessary life skills and learning how to relate and communicate with people from different walks of life, integrating faith and development of moral and social virtues is essential to the academic growth and success of any student.

In my classroom, I want students to have a freedom to express themselves, show their creativeness and finding out what their strengths and weaknesses. A learner-oriented teaching. As a teacher, it is my responsibility to find out what my learners want to achieve and what knowledge and experience that they already have that we can share with the group. In the book, The Culture of Education, Bruner writes that education tends to work well when learning is, first, participatory, provocative, communal, and collaborative; and second, when learning is a process of constructing meaning rather than receiving. This is not to recommend that we should discard the memorization of facts, but to recommend that we should examine to what effect facts are acquired. He suggests that the ultimate end of pursuing knowledge is to develop curiosity. With the proper motivation and direction, I believe that all children are capable of learning.

Teaching is understanding that each child is unique. Recognizing your students’ different learning styles to meet their needs can provide a quality education. As a teacher, facilitate the class to establish mutual learning goals, and then you can provide connections to what they already know to the new concepts they seek to create. I am a believer in active learning activities because they stimulate cooperative problem solving, intellectual argumentation which prepares them for real-life collaborative practice.

There is this cliché quote from Henry Adams that says, “A teacher affects eternity, he can never know where his influence stops”. Teaching gives you the power of change. Your choice of action exhibits not only what kind of educator you are but also as a person part of this society. I believe in the power of paying it forward. What you give to others, one day they will give to someone else and when we keep this chain going we know that we have done our part. As J. J. Watt said on his acceptance speech for NFL Man of the year (2018). “Whether we realize it or not, we are affecting everyone around us with our every move. The more that we can shine a light on the positivity and the good that there is in this world, the better off we're going to be. ”