My teaching philosophy is founded on 3 primary principles: that my classroom is an environment that balances the challenge of high expectations with the encouragement of playfulness and joy, that learning is most meaningful when grounded in students’ real life experiences, and that I am as much a learner as a teacher.
As well as being the place students come to learn, school is the physical location where kids spend the majority of their week and it is their main opportunity to socialize. To be sensitive to this, I try to incorporate as much movement and discussion in my classroom as possible through station activities, escape room game reviews, and regular group or partner work. I also believe that a successful classroom balances joy and high expectations by appealing to the inner child of all students no matter their age, while pushing and empowering students to work beyond their expectations. To do this I incorporate activities in my units that range from purely celebratory, such as sharing work only for the purpose of receiving colloquial praise and applause, to assignments that ask students to step further out of their comfort zone. For example, fishbowl seminars using student-created higher order thinking questions that incorporate their active listening and critical thinking skills, give them the opportunity to help teach each other and find meaning in a conversation facilitated by themselves and their peers.
I believe that learning is most powerful when the subject matter can be found in or applied to students’ lives outside of the classroom. For this reason, I make it a goal to draw on students’ real life experiences for creative projects and to incorporate current events as much as possible. For example, this year I created a unit that discussed adolescence as a social construct, and analyzed the rhetoric of news sources related to the Parental Rights in Education bill to consider how it often enforced common stereotypes about adolescence. The ability to read the news and examine it critically is an important skill in an English classroom, but it also directly benefits students by encouraging them to stay aware of current events in their community and in the world, especially those that affect them. Giving students a space to discuss current events other than with their parents or on social media allows them to discuss, inquire, and be exposed to worldviews they may not have encountered before.
In holding myself to high expectations, it is inevitable that I will stumble along the way. Each student comes with different skills, strengths, and ways of learning, as do I. I try to enter the classroom every day with the understanding that I am learning and growing with my students, not showing up to fill an empty bucket with knowledge. One of the most exciting things about teaching is that no day looks the same, each one is filled with its own unique joys and challenges.