We Are All Babes: My Teaching Philosophy



We Are All Babes: My Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy can be best summed up by the following scenes:

A baby is born. She blinks in the bright light. She cries in reaction. She is hungry. She seeks food and signals the world to this need by suckling her mouth. A month later, she has learned, through experience, that her parents respond to her cries. If she is wet or hungry or otherwise in need of attention, she cries. No one has explicitly taught her to do this. She has learned this survival skill through instinct and through her experiences.

Two months later, this curious child is crawling around, putting all that she can find in her mouth. Through trial and error, she learns that some things are meant to be eaten. Some things are not, but they feel good on her sore gums. Maybe you will say these things are instincts, too. So let me continue.

It is through the exploration in these early months of life that a child begins to construct her understanding of reality. Think of how a child learns to speak and understand language. Do we sit our children down in classrooms and instruct them on vocabulary? No. They learn from total immersion. They learn because they are curious. From their earliest moment, communication has surrounding them. They use a vast amount of cognitive energy to obtain language skills because they have discovered that speech is the key to successfully interacting in their environment in more meaningful ways.

How does this relate to instruction and education? Well, I am from the constructivist school of thought. Of course I do not suggest that we throw the child into the world and just leave them to learn what they will from experience and be done. As a teacher, it is my role to carefully create environments and learning activities that will allow a student to construct his/her own knowledge. For example, rather than just telling a student how knowledge of the parts of speech helps us understand what we read, I created the Magnetism of Language project, a project where students come to this knowledge on their own after a series of activities.

As a writing teacher, I tell my students often to “show, not tell,” to prove what they claim. I take that advice to heart in my classes. Through project based learning, my students internalize the concepts I try to teach them, rather than store them in their short-term memory for later regurgitation and then forgetting.

My role as teacher is to facilitate learning rather than be a sage dispenser of knowledge lecturing for ninety minutes a day. The bulk of my work takes place outside the classroom. When I am with my students, my job is to give them the tools to learn and to guide them gently to that learning. We remember more of what we experience than what we are told.

However, especially when it comes to reading, I realize that students need much more guidance than my philosophy suggests at first glance. We can not expect students to learn all there is to know through experience: direct instruction is also a necessity!

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