Teaching Philosophy
My teaching philosophy consists of a few well recognized ideologies that I believe create a safe classroom environment, teach students to learn science by practicing science, encourage students to grow and access to the best of their abilities, foster students to learn and practice social skills as well as content knowledge, and instill growth mindsets into students.
An extremely important philosophy is the premise of growth and fixed mindsets. This is a relatively new psychological phenomena that was first brought into the spotlight by psychologist Carol Dweck. It is the study of how people think differently in regards to failure. On one hand people can fail, learn from it, and try again, or they can fail, be overcome by not meeting expectations, and most likely quit. In this scenario, the person that learns from failure is exhibiting a growth mindset while the other that feels they didn’t meet expectations and quits exhibits a fixed mindset. Students almost certainly are not aware of the mindsets even though they encompass them all the time. It is important as an educator to teach students the only way to learn is to try your best and make mistakes. If you fail and make mistakes when you try your best, learn how to get better and keep trying. Students need to understand the growth mindset not only for my class, but to instill into their own lives and make it their own. Obviously there may not be time to teach them everything about the mindsets, but it is important to teach them the basics. In my opinion, the largest problem is when students think they do not need to put forth effort to learn. This creates high expectations and when the students fail, they feel like they are not able to accomplish learning or are not “smart enough”. The students then no longer hold an interest in the material because they think they cannot learn it and no longer try hard. This fixed mindset is a vicious cycle of failure where students put in zero effort to learn. For these reasons, I believe instilling growth mindsets into students can be enormously beneficial for my class as well as their lives in general.
The second is Humanism. This where an educator visualizes learning from the perspective of the human potential for growth. In short, becoming the best one can be. This philosophy is important to me because school is not only a place to learn content, but to learn how to be a better person along the way. This includes how students perceive their classmates and school faculty, how to perceive one’s self, and learning to cooperate and communicate effectively with others to achieve common goals. These skills are not directly addressed in any curriculum but are all things students need to learn and practice. I believe the school experience is as valuable for its opportunity to practice these social skills as it is to learn content. Students may not be able to fully understand some content for various reasons, but everyone should be able to improve on these valuable social skills while in school to use in life outside of the classroom.
Constructivism is another very important philosophy to include in a science classroom. This is the practice of having learners actively create their own understandings of reality through acting upon and reflecting on experiences in the world. The more common phrase is “learn science by doing science”. This practice is imperative in order to learn science most effectively for students. Every student comes into the classroom with unique prior academic knowledge and prior experiences related to content being learned in the class. In order to use this prior knowledge and experiences most effectively, I will create guided instruction where students investigate classroom phenomena first hand and expand their understanding by adding onto their prior knowledge, rather than traditional lecture before investigating. By doing this, students will connect their experiences of the phenomena in and out of the classroom in a manner that makes sense to them in understanding it. Often times teachers will lecture about content without fully exploring the prior knowledge and experiences of students in order to make meaningful connections to it. Constructivism also is much more engaging for many students by using student lack of knowledge to create curiosity when investigating unfamiliar phenomena. This curiosity feeds an interest into investigating the phenomena by wanting to discover an answer or how the phenomena works. Another common phrase for this is “don’t kill the wonderer”. Students are often turned off to many science concepts because most of the time they are not surprised or challenged by anything that takes place with traditional lecture before activity format teaching. Students are not given a chance to think on their own and formulate connections that are meaningful to them because they are told the content information up front and devote more energy to memorizing what they were presented with rather than formulating relationships, connections, and experiences with the material. With well supported guided instruction in a constructivism format, students will be able to learn science in meaningful, purposeful ways where they will be able to exercise scientific practices and classroom phenomena to make connections to their prior knowledge and experiences before being lectured the full content knowledge.
Information Processing is another great ideology I will implement in my classroom. This is the study of focusing on how the mind of students work and act. No educator is ever the same age as their students and it is often surprising how differently their students think or perceive things. This creates a constant quest for how students are understanding what they are being taught, what are they confused with, and what comes easiest to them. This is where formal and informal assessments come into play. I firmly believe in assessing students often using formative assessments, both formal and informal. This is not to be confused with summative assessments, but formative assessments can be short, long, challenging, straightforward, individual, or as a group. There are a great deal of methods to utilize formative assessments to attempt to jump into our students’ skin and understand what they are thinking. Informational Processing is important to me because of its power in guiding instruction for subsequent classes to help students understand what they are learning as best as they can. Students can not learn at a steady speed most of the time. Many times it is a stop and go type of learning where, as a class or individually, we need to stop and revisit ideas until they are understood in order to move forward in learning.
This is a list of some of the most important philosophies I will apply in my classroom. There are of course many other teaching strategies and techniques I will apply that strengthen the community of the classroom as well as make learning easier for students. Using these strategies while teaching will give them opportunities to work on certain skills that are not taught in the classroom and will be great for them to know and be able to do in their future. These techniques will teach my students the content they need to know as well as hopefully teaching them how to be better overall people that are kind and collaborative with one another that also have a fun time in my class.