Educational philosophy and personal teaching principles

Education

As an educator, I am ready to take anything that helps me understand and teach children better, but overall my philosophy could best be labeled as "constructionist." I believe that as a teacher, all my knowledge and experiences have led me to understand the world as I do. Both the things I have been formally taught and the things I have experienced have contributed to my large education.

Adults construct rules and "mental models" to help them understand the world around them. If we treat the children we teach with true respect, we will realize that they do the same thing. As they have new experiences, they form rules that are sort of like test hypotheses. They actively compare their conclusions, "the rules," to new experiences. They refine the rules and build their own mental models. This is the learning process -- the act of finding meaning in and making sense of the world around us. When children are taught well I believe the learning experience needs to be both interactive and hands-on. By interactive, I mean more than the teacher and student interacting with the lesson. I mean that in addition, the student needs to have hands-on experience with the subject whenever possible. So, for instance, it makes far more sense to teach children about weights and measures by actually having them weigh and measure things for a purpose: if a box label says it will hold 25 lb., how many copies of the dictionary will it hold? If we measure the table and the space between the bookcases, we can be sure whether the table will fit there or not before moving it.

Thus it stands to reason that children should be taught those things they are ready for based both on development and prior experiences. Since learning involves understanding the world around us, the chlidren's families and communities should play an important role in the educational process. This will help them tie what they learn to real life, and learning won't merely be abstract concepts presented from books and on worksheets. It will have everyday meaning for them.

This means that the best educational environment for children will be one that encourages exploration and allows them to experiment, test hypotheses and hunches, and encourage them to draw a variety of conclusions. Such a teaching approach will emphasize the process of discovering information rather than simply focusing on "right" and "wrong" answers.

In formal education, all teaching environments are headed by teachers. A teacher who teaches in such an exploratory environment will need to be curious, open to new ways of looking at old problems, and a person who respects children as thinkers and learners. Such a teaching approach also requires someone who understands the wider community in which the child and the school exist. For instance, if the children live in a community with a significant Hispanic or other ethnic population, the teacher should incorporate examples from the whole of that environment, not just the things that teacher happened to grow up with. So, for example, if the class is studying nutrition, all foods common to the children's environment should be included in the discussion. This might require that the teacher learn about foods he or she is not familiar with, or possibly, has never heard of. In that case the teacher might well find that the students had important information to teacher him or her. The class, including the teacher, would then have an opportunity to learn together. It would be a chance to make the learning hands-on by bringing examples of food from every culture represented in the class in so everyone could feel, smell and taste them. They could gather information on all these foods and end up with a food chart that represented the foods all the children in the class were likely to eat. This cultural enrichment would provide nutritional information all the children could use when with their families or in their neighborhoods.

A constructionist teacher will find examples of careful and systematic thinking about how children learn that can guide him or her in the classroom. Piaget and Vygotsky (Gredler, 2002) give us solid examples of what children are ready for and at what ages they are most likely to benefit from specific kinds of instruction. Piaget's theories help the constructionist teacher be aware that although children think about what they're doing, they go through cognitive developmental stages. Respecting the types of cognitive thinking a child is likely to use at a given age is another way to teach the child respectfully -- by neither teaching below their abilities or by demanding that they perform as little adults.

Maria Montessori might serve as an excellent role model for such a teacher. Montessori looked at children developmentally (2) and constructed specially-made instructional aids that encouraged children to explore the world carefully and systematically. She also treated the children with respect uncommon for the age, treating learning not as if every lesson were a new and challenging burden, but rather, presenting new information as a precious gift passed on from one generation to the next.

Most recently, Howard Gardner, Ph.D. has developed a framework that fits well with today's schools, environments, and existing curricula. He has formulated a theory of "multiple intelligences," the idea that different children will learn in different ways. He argues that our schools tend to produce students who learn information but don't always know how to apply it in new situations (Shaughnessy, 1994). An example of this might be the high school student who seems to be an excellent reader but who does not really understand what the instructions on a bottle of aspirin say. The ability translate mastered skills into new situations has been under-emphasized, resulting in a student who doesn't always think flexibly when reading. He encourages teachers to both teach and evaluate learning in multiple ways. So, while people may focus on the eight ways Gardner says children can be "smart," his final goal is for student to make connections between what they know and they don't know. He sees this as most likely to happen when teaching reflects multiple ways people may learn. This means that just because a child is, perhaps, a kinesthetic learner, he should be taught only in that way. If the information is presented through multiple modalities, the child's understanding of the material will broaden beyond his natural tendencies (Shaughnessy, 1994).