Educational Philosophy
I think to understand my educational philosophy you should first know why I am a teacher. In middle school, I hated school. My favorite subject was lunch/recess and after that gym. As a gamer, I was great at playing the game of school. I knew how much effort I needed to put in to get the grades I wanted. No subject appealed to me; I was just doing my job as a student. I entered 7th grade with this same mindset, but one class suddenly caught my attention: social studies. I can’t specify the exact moment, but I knew one of the catalysts was my teacher.
I became a teacher because I personally know the impact they can have on their students. From the good teachers, I learned how they managed their classrooms, created engaging learning opportunities, and transformed students’ perspectives. They never demanded respect; they earned it. They never yelled to get students’ attention; they simply asked for it. They weren’t at school to just do their job; they were also interested in me as a person. This was the type of teacher I longed to be and modeled my practices after. Although things didn’t go well my first year of teaching, I took that as an opportunity to reevaluate what I was doing in my classroom and came back better the next year.
My first lesson of the school year is called How Do I Study History: A Guide Through Dead Guys that No One Seems to Care About. I recognize that many of my students see history as a boring subject and for good reason. I have had worksheet history teachers in the past; they hand out worksheets everyday and expect you to copy and paste from the textbook. When I became a teacher, I vowed to never become a worksheet teacher and I try to set that precedent early. In this lesson, we learn about the Salem Witch Trials. First, I start with them doing an activity with their classmates trying to organize themselves into groups without witches; spoiler, none of them are witches. We then debrief why people ran around accusing one another of being witches. The first goal in my class is questions are essential to learning. After this, we examine other factors surrounding the witch trials. From the geographic locations to the cultures of religious groups, we see that there is more in play than just randomly accusing someone.
The second goal I instill in my students is to look at history through multiple perspectives. By the time they leave my class, they know that history is written by winners, but this doesn’t mean that the losers’ story isn’t worth learning. My favorite American is Tecumseh, a Native American who fought against the US in the War of 1812. When I share his story later in the school year, we spend a full day acting out a play that I wrote about his life. Towards the end of the lesson, I ask my students to look in their textbooks about how much is written about Tecumseh. They are shocked when they find only one and half paragraphs. History is a two-sided coin; often, we are shown one side without the other. My responsibility as their teacher is to make them more informed and to show both the good and bad of our history.
The final goal I teach my students is a growth mindset. Carol Dweck's Mindset: The New Psychology of Success talks about the importance of approaching new challenges with a growth mindset. This entails a willingness to not limit one's self to what is comfortable but learning how to approach problems and persevering when roadblocks emerge. One way I have done this is having students write raps/poems during our unit on the Civil War. Most students initially hate this assignment as they are embarrassed to share what they have written with their classmates. However, every year I have done this they always enjoy listening to one another’s raps/poems. Some students do an incredible job and even surprise themselves. By creating meaningful learning experiences like this, they will be more willing to try new things and see challenges as learning opportunities.
"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."
-Aristotle