Personal Teaching Beliefs

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Describe how your beliefs about teaching are demonstrated in your personal teaching style.

“Prepare the child for the path, not the path for the child.”: This statement best exemplifies my primary moral purpose as an educator. I get kids to do more than they thought they could and to believe in themselves through the challenge and adversity; which I tell them is the only way we grow as students and as people. Time and again each year, parents tell me how much their students talk about my class at home and that they really love it. I always appreciate hearing this since enjoyment now is never my primary purpose, but they enjoy it anyway. I am far-sighted in my high-expectations and am ambitious for the success of my students. My outlook
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I get 12-year-olds to research and become experts about antibodies, white blood cells, or cancer and to be excited about it. They believe me deeply when I say “Someday you will be sitting with a doctor getting some very heart wrenching news about a loved-one or even yourself, and you will be more ready to ask the right questions in your moment of anxiety and fear than most anyone in the world. Follow me, and I’ll lead you there.” I nudge them efficiently through superficial topic introductions and building background knowledge, then kick the door open wide to life-long curiosity, application, and synthesis. Newton’s Laws of Motion are a framework to explore the physics, thrills, and hazards of driving in a room full of teens about to get their driving learner’s permits. When I teach about adolescent brain development, I am more practically helping them contextualize their own struggles with a transforming teen brain. Teaching them genetics helps explain the origins of their family traits, but also helps deepen and embrace an understanding that the great advantages of biological diversity parallels that great advantages of social diversity. In short, I prepare each child for the path …show more content…
Policy talk over the years has cycled between harsh criticisms of schools and overconfident solutions which has created incoherent guidance in practice. Our top administrators serve as a bridge between public schools and the environment where pressures come from, but we need more support on our side of the bridge. I believe that public education will need to respond more effectively to evolving pressures amid ongoing restraints of federal and state regulations, lack of funding, and a lack of confident teachers who can mutually support each other in trying and carrying out new instructional ideas. But the institutional structure of public school is still probably more influential over policy than policy has been over institutional practice. While public education has great deal of artifacts to rid itself of, we still have a great deal of equity and social capital to work with. There are common values that educational leaders, politicians, parents, and the greater community can all agree upon. We value teachers that influence students by challenging them to develop their potential, who make subjects come to life, and that give caring advice at stressful times. These common values seem to be distracted as of late and we need to regroup around them in order to reform. We need to negotiate a common purpose that serves the common good