Teaching Philosophy and Practical Experience

¶ … Teaching Philosophy and Practical Experience My Early Philosophical Approach to Education One of my first assumptions about education was that teachers could greatly influence the attitudes and performance of grade school students provided they were sufficiently attentive to the manner in which education was introduced to them initially. At that time, I regarded the degree to which students differed in their response to schooling as substantially a function of the feedback they received in their earliest educational experiences.

It was my belief at that time that many low-performing students had not received an optimal introduction to education and that if their teachers had been more attentive to the earliest signs that they were losing interest in or experiencing difficulty with their studies, many of them could have improved tremendously as students. Moreover, I also believed that self-confidence and self-esteem in relation to intelligence and learning capabilities played a large role in student performance.

By responding to the very first signs of difficulty, I hoped to minimize the degree to which their self-perceptions in those regards could be harmed by the internalization of negative perceptions based on academic weakness, particularly in relation to peers. Practical Implementation Based on that fundamental belief and various implications of that belief, I set out to make sure that I was as attentive as possible to the individual reactions of students to their studies in grade school.

I had expected that by identifying the precise point where each student first began experiencing difficulty or where comprehension dropped from previous levels, I would be able to intervene and provide the amount (and type) of assistance to enable most (if not all) of my students to prevent them from performing less well than they had been performing before they first started experiencing difficulty. I tried very diligently to monitor my students for the first signs that they were experiencing difficulty.

My intention was to avoid letting their comprehension, confidence, and performance drop by minimizing the lag in between their first difficulties and the first attempt to provide informal remedial help to get them back on track before their self-perception was affected adversely by the difficulties they encountered. Experience with Failure Retrospective Analysis I discovered that there were many more elements of academic performance than could possibly be accounted for in such a broad conceptual approach.

Likewise, the many variables that influence and determine academic performance are interrelated in such complex ways that my assumptions were, apparently, simplistic albeit idealistic and well-motivated. I discovered, for example, that some students are simply disinterested in many academic subjects, irrespective of their intelligence and self-esteem. In fact, in my experience, the instances where poor performance appeared to be linked to early educational experiences were far fewer than instances where entirely different factors seemed to be responsible.

Additionally, I realized that it was not realistic to assume that I would necessarily be able to identify the precise point where each student first experienced difficulties for several different reasons. Since that time, I have.