PhilosophyStaetment

The Philosophy Statement

All of life is about learning. Once we open our eyes to the world, we start learning from our parents, who, I believe, are our first teachers. As an infant, I listened and listened to the words that were flying around my head. I learned how to make sounds from the first lullaby that my mother sang and the first words that my father said to me when he was playing with me. I learned how to walk when my parents held my hands to help me keep my balance. From my sisters, brothers, and peers, I learned how to share what ever belonged to me, and along with playing games with them I developed my imagination, while I was always trusting my teachers as much as my parents, and I was learning from them. Now, as an adult and a teacher, I still compare the role of a teacher to the role of parents unconsciously. Therefore, I believe that as a teacher/educator my mission is to expand the boundaries of my students’ knowledge, to help them learn how to believe in themselves and feel more confident, and to create an environment in the classroom in which all my students can feel safe to approach. I’ll try to be someone who will respect them and validate their worth; however, they will have different needs through their learning process. Moreover, at their level of academic education, my goal as a teacher is to teach them reasoning, problem solving, and critical thinking in order them to learn use these skills in their real lives.

To reach this goal, I must know my students. In communities with cultural diversity, the first step for getting familiar with students is to know their cultures. In this way, I can bring their cultures into the classroom by celebrating their holidays, reading books related to their cultures, asking them to write about their traditional events with their parents and their relatives, and so on. By the same token, by showing respect to their traditions and customs and their native languages, I can make them more motivated and enhance the process of teaching and learning in my class.
I, as an English Learner, believe that my second- language learner students and I are in the same boat, and I am very sensitive to their needs. I can understand the problems that they are facing to throughout their learning, so I can offer them encouragement and first-hand to deal with those problems in order to support their learning process. Furthermore, as I live in a community where most of the people are Latinos, I hope some day I have a chance to learn some Spanish. This way I can communicate with the parents of my English learner students as well as my English speaker students and build a community in my classroom.

This is my belief that teaching philosophy is chained to learning philosophy. We continuously go back and forth and change our roles as a teacher and as a learner. I learn from my students, my children, and from my grandchildren in the future, as I had learned from my grand parents, my parents, sisters and brothers, and my peers. This is the flow of life, and I hope I can keep this flow in my own classroom.

Home Page