My Teaching Philosophy

My priority with my learners is to protect and strengthen their social-emotional well-being through experiences and relationships created in the classroom. Creating a safe space for kids to be themselves when they might not have one anywhere else, and getting them engaged and excited about the subject that I love are what I enjoy most about teaching. I make it a goal of mine to get to know my students personally quickly, I want them to feel like I am assigning value to their personal lives as well as their education. I need to have a relationship with my students where they feel comfortable coming to me with problems they are having, or questions when they don’t understand things and comfortable enough where they can give me feedback on my teaching and on lessons so I can adjust my practice better.

Teaching is so much more than the content, it is about giving your students the skills they need to be able to go out into the world and make it a better place; through practicing kindness, respect, and critical thinking, which all need to be modeled by the teacher. It is also so important to me that children learn how to fail and how to pick themselves back up. They are at such a critical age where things start to pick up, they are involved in more extracurriculars, they are getting more school work, and they have higher expectations. With all of these life adjustments they are not going to be perfect all the time, and they need to know that is okay. I try to model to the best of my ability how to make mistakes, learn from them, and move on.

With all the interpersonal values, content is obviously still important, however, science should be much less about memorizing facts and much more about the application of knowledge. That is why I utilize phenomena-based science education. This format of teaching creates shared experiences for all students in the classroom and does not rely on students' prior knowledge, and builds on the science foundation they have by asking them to figure a lot of things out for themselves. This helps them build critical thinking skills, teamwork skills, and skills for defending their opinions. These are skills that they will be able to utilize and build on outside of the classroom throughout the rest of their academic career. My goal as an educator is to give students the hard and soft skills they need to succeed in and out of the classroom.