Artifacts 4-teaching Philosophy

Artifacts 4-Teaching Philosophy Yiran Liao

When I think about teaching, I believe that teaching is a profession to inspire others. Being a teacher not only need to acquire the ability to manage a classroom like setting up rewards system, establishing rules, disciplines and procedures, but also need to to make sure students have a well-organized, encouraging and positive learning environment. The goal of teaching is to ensure that students can study in a caring and orderly environment and finally to not only help students to achieve academic learning improvement, but also foster their social and emotional growth. There are four principles in my teaching philosophy. First of all, a benchmark of good teaching is acquiring classroom management skills, thus teacher needs to set specific rules, routines and procedures and consistently follow through. By setting up and following through rules, routines and procedures, students can understand more about the expectations from the teacher. It is also helpful for the smooth running of learning and teaching. Besides, effective classroom management can maintain appropriate students’ behavior. In order to reinforce students’ good behaviors and reduce bad behaviors, teacher can set up positive and negative consequences, enforce classroom’s rules promptly and consistently from the very beginning of the school year. The second principle is building a good relationship with students. That means teacher should always be responsive to students, understand each student personality and care about them. It is important to build a trustworthy and respectful classroom environment, thus students can be safe and willing to learn from the teacher. The third principle is to evoke students’ internal learning motivation. The primary method is to let students find learning is interesting and funny, students can acquire pleasant and satisfaction from learning, then they are willing to learn. Moreover, when students find they can apply what they learned into real life, they will show bigger enthusiasm in learning the content. For example, if teacher uses coins to explain the rules of addition, students learned more effectively. Another way to evoke students’ internal learning motivation is to promote critical thinking skills. In order to cultivate independent thinking, instead of just rotten memorization, I encourage students to ask me questions at the beginning of the class. I believe digging out questions is a good way to improve critical thinking skills. I also tried an activity named chalk talk to let students walk around the classroom to observe different pictures about Chinese culture, then they need to think and write down their thoughts on the chart paper, they can read and comment on others’ thoughts before the whole class start discussion.

Last but not least, the forth principle of my teaching philosophy is inspiring others. Different from other careers, education can touch students deep inside. I believe teaching can inspire students’ spirits. To some extent, a teacher is like a role model for the students. If a teacher shows merits like being positive and creative the students will be influenced by the teacher and become positive and creative as well. I was inspired by one of my teachers when I was young. Once I felt very upset because of my terrible score, my teacher told me score meant nothing, but the effort I showed as well as the methods that I used to learn were important. Everyone could suffer frustration, the key to overcome frustration was to be brave and face it. Now, as a teacher, I will try my best to give high expectations to all of my students, and inspire the spirits of them just like what my teacher taught me before. I found the most effective teachers are fair, optimistic and determined, they can be friendly to students and at the same time be firm and strict of following rules. Compared with other effective teachers, I think my strengths are always showing positive attitudes and can be caring and friendly to students. I used to think I was bad at consistently following through my classroom rules and procedures, but now I change my thought and be more confident about myself, not only because I know I’m just learning now, but also because I acquire knowledge from my master courses and practices from last year’s teaching experiences. I may also encounter several challenges when I try to imply my teaching philosophy in my future class, but I have courage to overcome.