Teaching Philosophy Statement

While collaborating with other educators is important, I also need to think about how I will work with support staff in my classroom. Throughout my academic career, I have seen many support staff in classrooms ignored or used as assistants to the teacher when they are not working directly with the students with whom they have been assigned to work. This is not only a waste of a valuable resource in your classroom, but also extremely demeaning. My hope is that I will be able to learn from the support staff information about students I might otherwise never learn – such as advice on how to appropriately help a student with ADHD who might need to take some time out of class to refocus. No matter how much research I conduct on my own about various

Project-based learning is a wonderful way to get students directly involved in their education. With project-based learning (PBL), students seek the answer to a question or problem that they believe needs to be solved. This could be something in their community, in their school or in the world. It usually aligns with the unit they have just been working on in class; for example, students in a Global Geography class might work on a project that addresses conservation in their town. In this type of project, the teacher does not own the learning; “teachers generally serve as facilitators, providing scaffolding, guidance and strategic instruction as the process unfolds” (Holm, 2011, p. 1). The educator helps students as they embark on their own learning journey – I will not be the expert on every students’ project idea; they will be learning about their topic and teaching me as they complete their work. I can guide them, offer assistance with organization or developing deeper driving questions and maybe steer them in a different direction, but ultimately they own the learning in this kind of project. PBL has been shown “to be an effective means of teaching both content information and related skills” (Holm, 2011, p. 8); students “exhibited greater gains in content knowledge than their traditionally taught peers” (Holm, 2011, p. 8). In comparison to lecture-based classrooms, students also improved in areas of process, group skill development and information literacy skills (Holm, 2011, p. 8). Studies have also shown that student motivation and engagement increased when learning through project-based learning (Holm, 2011, p. 9), and that they preferred this hands-on approach to education. While it is not possible to teach in this way all the time, there are certainly areas in which I might be able to put this approach to use. It helps students to become