Teaching Philosophy

“Acquiring literacy strategies [gives students] greater confidence and authority about [their] own development” (Rubinstein-Avila, 2003, p. 297). This research, in conjunction with work from Shanahan and Shanahan, supports strategy teaching - instruction that gives students skills to excel as disciplinary experts while developing their overall literacy at the same time. This means that, within the English classroom, students need to be given access to English-specific resources, vocabulary, and frameworks that allow them to engage in textual criticism, discussion, and analysis.

The cornerstone of student engagement is a student-centered pedagogy - a classroom where students are empowered and centralized in the curriculum. According to Mason (not me, the researcher), “When learners use, and so develop, their own powers, their motivation and engagement deepens, as does their disposition to engage in the future” (Mason , 2009, p. 208). A classroom where the only engaged party is the teacher does not provide an environment conducive to learning, healthy rigor, or genuine inquiry.

The lifeblood of the English classroom is, and always has been, discourse. In his work, Parker cites Voltaire's famous quote in saying "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" (Parker 2018, p. 3). The priority of discussion implies the presence of disagreement, and this is a reality that we ought to embrace, not fear. The teacher's role in this discourse is "as collaborator…with the goal of furthering students’ engagement with the text and with each other.” (Ippolito, 2013, p. 89)

An easy facet of teaching to overlook, but also the most important one, is that the adolescents who enter our classrooms are people first and students second. If we forsake this most basic piece of instruction, we start seeing our students as minds without hearts or souls. “Learning from this broad view is as much about the complex interaction of personal and collective interests, intentions, emotional commitments, and beliefs about how to be a person...as it is about personal and collective ways of knowing and doing" (Herrenkohl & Mertl, 2010, p. 2).