My educational philosophy is fluid, as I am always learning. But I do have some educational beliefs that are permanent with my teaching process. As a teacher my responsibility is to provide engaging and dynamic curriculum for my students, to expect my students to have autonomy with how they learn and have grit when faced with a failure in their work, and for the classroom to provide constructive discussion among all. With these ideals, my students will learn how to be the best that they can be.
It is important for curriculum to be dynamic and engaging for students. I don’t believe in giving students busywork by answering questions at the end of a chapter or filling out worksheets. This is because if the work isn’t challenging or too challenging for students, it doesn’t help teach or reinforce concepts for students. Instead student’s work should encourage all to be challenged and should have the resources available to solve the answer they need. The work should include making of some kind, to test their solutions in real-time rather than saying it will work on a piece of paper. For this to be engaging, the subject/s should be brought to the classroom in the form of a real-world application as a real problem they can solve or acting as a team of professionals who do this work daily in the workplace. This will naturally create dynamic curriculum, as the lessons will then become less about teaching one thing, to learning about multiple concepts as they are needed to solve a problem. As Seymour Papert says, “Every maker of video games knows something that the makers of curriculum don’t seem to understand. You’ll never see a video game being advertised as being easy. Kids who do not like school will tell you it’s not because it’s too hard. It’s because it’s–boring”.
A tinkering or maker mindset is important for all people to have in their lives, which is why it should be a part of the classroom day-to-day. As Alice Baggett describes a tinkering mindset in her book, The Invent to Learn Guide to Making in the K–3 Classroom: Why, How, and Wow! “One of the most powerful things you can do to set the philosophical tone in your makerspace is to hammer home the idea that taking risks, trying new things, and making mistakes are not only acceptable actions—they’re desirable actions.” And as Dale Dougherty defines the maker mindset in his paper The Maker Mindset “…a growth mindset that encourages students to believe they can learn to do anything”. All too often a student wants to be fed the answer and produce an A+ on their grade for memorization. This method creates adults who have little to no autonomy or creativity, and instead expects to be told what to do, often to the minutest detail, and then do only what is expected. Instead, I believe in not giving students a step-by-step instruction on how to do a project, and instead they are required to observe, ask questions, research, try a solution, have permission to fail (most important), and try again based on what they learned. In teaching this model, we create students who learn how to solve new problems, have grit, autonomy, and think creatively.
Feedback from teacher, peers, and the community (if applicable), is important for students to get a better understanding of their learning as well as great practice to both respectfully defend their learning as well as to give respectful and constructive feedback of their peers’ learning. The feedback process is a great way for the teacher to also evaluate the progress of the student, helping to limit or even eliminate the need for tests to assess learning in the classroom. Using informal and formal feedback methods can assess if the student has been meeting the goals of their learning and can even be a way for students to have more control of seeing their own learning as well as learning how to teach themselves where they need to spend more time and what learning goals they have already accomplish. This also naturally creates a realistic way that adults learn when they are on the job, allowing time to accomplish specific goals rather than need to prove knowledge in every goal at one specific time (such as in a 45-minute end-of-unit test).
My educational philosophy is obviously not the standard practiced in today’s schools, but I truly believe in following these philosophies to create a well-rounded human who loves to learn and is more prepared for life after school. Curriculum needs to be provided in a more real world application for students and not as a Ford assembly line that used to work for us in the past, students need to have a tinkering/maker mindset in order to be more forward thinking and ready to solve real problems effectively, and students should be prepared to discuss their learning rather than to be told how their learning is going. If I follow these principles, I can help create a child who will be ready to be an adult that we need to see more of in our real world.