Teaching Philosophy

Teaching for me is being able to be the mentor I didn’t have when I was a student. I teach to give my students a safe space to share experiences, to embrace culture and differences, to inspire kids and to motivate them to love and respect nature. Embracing the different cultures, backgrounds, ethnicities, abilities, and diversity in general is what makes a loving and respectful classroom for me. I teach with a nurturing perspective, this meaning I want to see my students learn and grow in knowledge that they are interested in.

My teaching methods include embracing each and one of my students’ ways of learning, having different options for my students to choose from so that everybody has an option to learn. There is so much to learn from nature, and I like seeing my classroom as a whole ecosystem and how we each work together and bring our own ideas to make a functional and diverse classroom. To ensure my teaching methods are understandable for kids in elementary school I included different types of activities and learning methods that enhances their different intelligences such as visual, verbal, kinesthetic and naturalistic. All my teaching includes a mix of Spanish and English and both are used during the lesson. For example, when adapting to student’s needs, I always have my slides in English while I speak in Spanish so they can be listening to one language while they read in the other language.

I strongly believe on engaged pedagogy, that meaning that we work as a group in between students and the mentor. There are also many ways in which we can implement collaboration working together as a team and my favorite one is Storytelling. We can share our interests with students and have them listen to you carefully so they can later share their own story. This is the moment for me as a teacher where I feel more connected with my students, when we bond over a story. When I told my story on our field trip, I had my students be part of it while asking them what animals lived on the forest and this is a great example of how this could change depending on our students that in some way reflect our background. Stories will always change and adapt and that is what I love about them, you can always add your personal touch and that’s what makes it special. No story is ever going to be told twice.

Changing my students view of how fun it is to be out in nature and demonstrate them how we can learn so many different things if we intertwine them and find a connection in between everything that we do. I value the knowledge my students have, and I use encouraging words when I see that they are putting the effort in learning. Facilitating a diverse, equitable, just, and inclusive learning is my main goal as an educator.