Teaching Philosophy
Teaching and learning has been a passion of mine since I was young and I will always enjoy it .When I was a child, I used to play ‘teachers’ with my soft toys and I would teach them in a very teacher directed manner and would yell at them if they ‘misbehaved’. Reflecting back, I realise that my approach and strategies may not be the most efficient, and I now believe there needs to be purpose behind your actions and your belief. My vision statement that underpins my philosophy is:
Every student has the right to learn in a respectful way.
Parts of my philosophy will be subject to change as I gain more experience teaching, but I believe this vision statement should remain the same. According to Rogers, every student should be given a right to education with dignity and respect.
I also believe that becoming a teacher, although seems like working alone is, in fact working as part of a larger team, or working with ‘partners’. Therefore it is important to be professional in your approach – especially with your connections with students, staff, parents and the wider community. I believe this need to be considered as it modelling respect and diplomacy. With a teaching role and from my experience working with teachers, I find that is a very difficult to keep teaching as a ‘nine to five’ job, as I found the most effective teachers adapt and view teaching and learning as a lifestyle.
Therefore, as I am continually learning as a teacher, I have decided to take on the ‘reflective practice perspective’ with my philosophy where it is important for ‘especially pre-service teachers to reflect critically on their actions’. This approach allows me to critically reflect and analyse my actions as a teacher and seek counsel from others in the profession. It also allows teachers to seek student’s perspective in learning and teaching. Concerning my teaching practice this would include reflecting on effective strategies to deal with the wider education community, stating explicit classroom management strategies and examining how they match state curriculum documents. The reason why I have adopted this approach is that certain strategies and tactics may change in the course of my teaching and depending on the school contexts. This also ensures that I am striving for my vision statement and finding effective ways to teach respectfully for all students.
