Teaching Philosophy

For me teaching has always been about the students and the community that is created among my students. 

In the future I want my classroom to be an inviting, learning community where my students feel comfortable to share their common values and beliefs, while actively engaging in learning from one another. A learning community allows students to develop meaningful ways to enhance, enrich, honor and celebrate each other. This form of education places a primary focus on the development of trusting, supportive, and resilient relationships between all members of the learning community.

A learning community supports and inspires the intellectual and personal development of all members of the community. It fosters an environment that values diversity, differences, and the rights of all individuals in a supportive atmosphere where nobody feels judged. It supports and creates new knowledge through research and scholarly inquiry on the part of teachers, staff and students, and it shares that knowledge with the broader community. A learning community is centered on the classroom, but extends throughout the school and into the world around it. In such a community, all activities, roles, and responsibilities are related with its members engaged in a common enterprise.

To establish a learning community in my classroom I would encourage cooperative learning which is a successful teaching strategy in which small teams, each with students of different levels of ability, use a variety of learning activities to improve their understanding of a subject. Each member of a team is responsible not only for learning what is taught but also for helping teammates learn, thus creating an atmosphere of achievement. Students work through the assignment until all group members successfully understand and complete it. With cooperative learning students are encouraged to ask partners for help before they ask the teachers. Students work better together as groups. Students work more effective in learning communities of support. Teachers need to provide students with opportunities to take ownership in their own learning.