Educational Philosophy

I love being a student. From my elementary school years buying fresh new supplies, eagerly anticipating the week after Labor Day to standing on the stage at Thalian Hall giving my high school salutatorian speech to a small but avid audience of onlookers, being a student is a “job” I do well.  I naively thought when I began my teaching career that being a “good” student would translate into having a good understanding of students and thus being a “good” teacher. My approach to teaching then was very content and teacher centered; if only I could encapsulate the material just right, enlightenment would result. Those students not getting it were clearly not trying hard enough. As I consider my first 15 years of teaching, it is amazing to me how much I have learned about education and how different my thinking is now. I have had several key learning experiences during this time that have shaped my philosophy and understanding about education. Through each experience, I came to the holistic realization that only by being a student of learning can you truly be an effective teacher. For me, there is no being a student or a teacher; the two roles are inextricably connected.

 The air conditioned air was crisp as I sat dutifully taking notes at the 2005 Schools Attuned Workshop in Charlotte, NC. The instructor with her colorful PowerPoint was saying something I had to listen hard to understand. Did she mean that a student who did not understand or who was continually not doing his or her work maybe just learned differently? Did she say that when students aren’t “getting it,” it is up to the teacher to teach it differently? “When it becomes a power struggle of teacher versus student,” she went on, “no real learning will ever occur.” This statement resonated with me then and still does today, especially now that I have become the mother of a child who is not the same student that I was. Every brain learns differently. I learned through this experience to respect those differences and create a classroom where multiple learning styles can thrive.

 All I could hear was the scratch of pen on paper. No tapping of keyboards, but ink being absorbed and ideas ricocheting around the room. This is what I remember the most about my time at Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking in 2012 – the silence and the writing. Our diverse group of twenty ranged from teachers at international schools in Turkey to teachers at progressive public schools in California to smaller independent school teachers like me. We came together to shift our own thinking about writing and its purpose. Our instructor started off with the statement, “Everybody is a writer – or no one is a writer.” We learned about how to infuse our classrooms with writing and to teach that writing is a tool for thinking. It is not just a finished product at the end of the unit, but rather writing is a method to unlock and communicate ideas. I learned through this experience to take the fear and pressure out of writing and open the doors to the process.

 I shifted on my thermarest mattress trying to get comfortable. The air smelled of rain and moss as I listened to the quiet voices around me. This was 2015 and my twelfth Outward Bound excursion – one as a cocky high school student, one as a slightly less cocky college student, and ten as an accompanying adult. “How can you have done this so many times?” the weary group of seniors around me asked. “Because every time I learn something new,” I replied. The conversation continued as the instructors asked the students (me included) to reflect on their experiences that week and comment on each other’s contribution in the group. The student who I thought disliked me as a teacher in 10th grade talked about how much I had inspired her then; another student who always struggled to get his classwork done made a comment so acute it echoed off the rafters. I was struck once again by how much learning happens outside the classroom walls, and by how much students absorb and see, even when we think they don’t. I learn again and again on Outward Bound that providing opportunity for these explorations of self – and sometimes then just getting out of the students’ way - is critical to the learning process.

 In 2010, our English department gathered for a “retreat” with Dr. Michael Smith to learn about redesigning our curriculum with Essential Questions. The six hours we spent with Dr. Smith did more probably than any other learning experience I have had to shape my philosophy on education. This Essential Question approach took my understanding of learning differences, my awareness of the process of writing, and my belief in student potential and connected them all together. It helped me to truly understand that learning stems from authenticity and from ownership, searching for your own answer to the enduring questions in our world. As students in my classes study the sources I share and bring in their own sources for our essential questions, I am learning for the first time just as they are. We were lucky to host Dr. Smith again just a few weeks ago for another retreat. This experience sparked again in me the focus and desire for my classroom to be foremost an open space for creative and critical thought.

 I love being a teacher, but perhaps even more so I love the process of learning. I am drawn to designing curriculum, to learning about student brain development, to teaching meta-cognition, and all that learning about learning entails. I am a student at heart and that is what shapes the teacher I continue to become.