Teaching Philosophy Statement

For as long as I can remember, I have considered teaching as a career, but there was always a question of which level. After taking my first chemistry class in high school, I knew it would be the subject I taught. Chemistry blends my passion for math and logical thinking with abstract thought and real-world application. I was and still am, in love with the subject. However, I realize that not all students have the same passion for chemistry, usually because of a less-than-positive experience with a science, technology, engineering, or math class. This feedback from my peers has inspired me to be the type of chemistry teacher to change the negative stigma and hopefully inspire more students to pursue careers in science or related areas. It is

As a culturally relevant teacher, I must understand that each student that walks into my future classroom is a compilation of all their individual experiences and cultural background. The diversity of the students and their differing interests should be used as a tool to drive learning. I was an aid in a 9th grade classroom where one of the teacher’s assignment utilized the idea of individuality. The assignment was a newscast where the individual students filmed a segment based on their personal interests and research about their passion related to the topic of ecology. While each student’s engagement looked different because of their topic, each has held to the same standard of quality and full participation in the activity. In my future classroom, I would want to implement a similar project that allows the students the freedom chose their topics, while still learning about over-arching idea, for example in the chemistry classroom,

Science is also an active and ever-changing subject that requires hands-on experience. I plan on taking full advantage of these ideas in my future culturally relevant classroom and want to utilize experiments to show my students the concepts I am teaching. I have had the opportunity as part of my college’s chemistry club to demonstrate mini-experiments to elementary aged students and understand the importance of making the material accessible to their level of understanding. This was achieved by drawing parallels to ideas they already knew, like explaining the idea dissolving with Kool-Aid powder in water. I also encouraged the asking of questions to future their understanding and curiosity. These ideas can be used as the students age and are in high school. I have found that teaching abstract concepts is easier using the same method of parallels. I especially try to stress connections between units and patterns that will help make the complex nature of chemistry more accessible. Unit conversion is continually a hard concept for high school students to understand, as I witnessed in a 10th grade chemistry class, so I always started with examples that are universal and visual, like converting centimeters to meters, when I explained the ideas. However, there was always the goal that the students move past the easy examples and try harder