My philosophy of teaching
begins on the premise of gratitude. I have been given a gift to share: the joy
of encouraging learning in young people. I must unpack the gift and share the
contents. Teaching is not about being liked or feared as much as it is about
exercising a privilege. I believe in the process of struggling to make
knowledge and skills of interest to my students. I teach so they may appreciate
learning more than earning the grade. I teach not to earn a wage or to be a
loyal member of the collective, but to be an honourable, gracious and giving
mentor and teacher.
I believe teaching is about being fully present and engaged in the
classroom. Presence has everything to do with inner composure and outer
connectivity to the students. Personal engagement has two sides: the side of
knowing the content well enough to let it go as a preoccupation and to let the
moment dictate what to use and how. The other side is passion for the subject,
emanating from me as part of what makes me tick.
I believe teaching is about accepting people. The behaviours are only
symptoms of deeper soul issues. I consciously embrace patience, kindness,
dialogue and fairness to all. Subconsciously, I limit these attitudes when I
don’t see changed behaviours. Then I have to remind myself that a student’s
life is conditioned by more complex things than my singular influence in my
classroom. Accepting people means keeping the door of communication and care
open day after day, week after week. The student must still be accountable for
deadlines and quality of work, but I can make the hard calls like “It’s now too
late to recover this grade” in a matter of fact way that sends the message
“This is the end of the process and you have fallen short in spite of the
opportunities for recovery given.”
I believe teaching is about the predictable and the element of surprise.
Students gain security and can make measurable progress when certain aspects of
the course don’t change, especially standards of evaluation and certain daily
or weekly procedures that help them feel comfortable in the learning
environment. But I look for ways to
incite interest through novelty and varying strategies. In my class the
students cannot say for certain that they will be sitting where they were
before, or that the lesson will unfold exactly as it did yesterday.
I believe in mastery learning. It is a waste of my time to give a
percentage to a piece of work only to have the student ask “ Do I need to keep
this?” once the mark is noted. No. There are usually things to work on to
improve, try again, perfect and resubmit. Practice and perfect before settling
on the final product. This approach makes assessing messy at times, overlapping
old and new work, re-entering results a second or third time. But the message I
want to convey is: “Your work is worthy of a process of betterment, and my
feedback is worth taking into account for you to get to the next level of
performance.”
Finally, I believe teaching is a work of the spirit. Pointing the way,
as Buber would say, has to do with gaining enough of the students’ respect and
trust to be able to suggest new ways of thinking about things, looking at other
points of view, opening our minds up to the bigger questions of life, and the
students are willing to go there with me.
In summary, I believe in and am committed to being and becoming a present,
engaged, content prepared yet flexible, accepting yet holding to account,
predictable yet fresh, a hound for the student’s best work, and an enlarger of
the mind and spirit kind of teacher.
