My Personal Philosophy Statement

K. M.

            I believe that all students have a right to learn.  I believe that schools should be designed so that students, no matter their differences, stay intellectually challenged.  Schooling should center on the goals of making students democratic citizens and prepared for the real world.  Individuals should be taught lifelong lessons that will allow them to advance in society and allow society to evolve as a whole. 

            As a teacher, I want to design a curriculum centered on student experience.  I want to include vertical integration into my lesson plans so that the students continue to stay challenged and apply what their prior knowledge to what they are learning next.  I want my students to be able to apply abstract theories more and more to literature and time goes on and be able to write creatively and analytically.  I also want to incorporate fun and creative language activities so that my students leave my classroom with a more pronounced lexicon and an ability to use more vocabulary in their everyday speech.  I want my curriculum to allow for the study of a wide variety of literary topics and genres.  I want my students to have more of a choice in what they read and be held more responsible for the projects, group work, presentations, and other creative assignments so that they feel accomplished when they are finished.

            Looking at my curriculum, one can see that I favor the constructivist method of teaching more than any other method.  I want my students to be able to construct their own meanings of the literature we read and the genres we discuss in class.  I want to allow them to develop critical thinking and problem solving skills by doing more group work and hands on activities like performing plays or writing group poetry.  I want to build off of what they already know and allow them to discover new things about a text and formulate their own opinions.  Students should remain challenged but able to complete the task at hand.

            Using some of the aspects of the constructivist method in my classroom, I want my students to take on the challenges given to them and accept responsibility for their own work.  I believe that the role of the student is to give great effort and take part in their own learning experience.  Students need to be open participants, reflective thinkers, and respectful citizens both in and out of my classroom.  In turn, my role as teacher would be to provide them with demanding material and coach them into discovering the texts and new ways of written expression.  I am responsible for facilitating learning and not being bias to any one student’s opinion.  I need to provide a starting point for ideas to flow and provide a structured but comfortable environment where students feel open to self-expression.  Students should be allowed to learn in an atmosphere free from criticism and open to creativity.

            I think the best way for me to be prepared to teach this type of curriculum and set up my classroom in this way is to practice and observe other teachers.  I think it is beneficial that I observe the positive and negative other secondary English teachers do and then practice my own philosophy of teaching during student teaching.  Preparing lesson plans and teaching with the aid of another teacher will assist me in gaining the confidence I need to teach on my own.  I want to have as little doubts in my own teaching abilities as possible when I set foot inside my first real classroom.

            I know that I have been successful at demonstrating this philosophy when I see that my students understand it.  When my students can relate what I have helped them learn to their own experiences and put it in their own words.  I want to be able to see that my students have conceptualized the obtained information, free from mindless recall or short-lived memorization.  I think that through doing creative projects, group work, papers, and presentations, I will know that students understand the curriculum.  I want my students to retain the information from my class by discovering it for themselves with my help.  Hopefully, my students will look back at me and say that I helped them, motivated them, and inspired them.