Personal Teaching Philosophies Centre

Personal Philosophy of Teaching

Discuss about the Personal Teaching Philosophies Centre.

Teachers are the professionals, who help their fellows to acquire knowledge, competences and values of life. A teacher has a significant contribution in shaping a student’s life; however, the success of the profession depends upon the philosophies the teacher follows in her professional life. It is a complex, multifaceted activity, which often requires the teachers to play the role of a multitasker. Thus, some teaching principles and standards should be followed by the teacher to make teaching more effective and efficient, thereby being able to implement principles to meet their commitment aligning with the procedures and policies or the institution as well as with the professional goal. In this paper, I will discuss about my personal philosophy of teaching.

According to my perspectives, if an individual expert does not understand the best way of communicating her knowledge to her students, her expertise is useless. Communication is one of the key aspects for distributing knowledge and help students to build their own knowledge base along with self esteem. I have always tried to be an excellent communicator, to identify my student’s area of interest and explore individual’s choices regarding a subject. From my life experience I have observed that people who build up their career upon their area of interest gain huge success in life compared to people who try to build up their career upon a subject, which is out of his area of interest. On the other hand, another philosophy of mine is to create a student-centred learning environment in the classroom and provide the opportunity to the students to connect the learning environment and tools with the real world. Promoting the connections between the real worlds and learning environment, I give my students the opportunity to implement their learning in future, as a result students feel the learning curriculum more interesting and useful.

Another important philosophy of mine, which I have learned from my professional career that it is crucial to understand the individual student, his interest and learning pattern, based on which I decide his learning materials, which provides me the opportunity to explore the student’s ability. I have aligned by philosophy with “standard 1.2, understand how student learn” by AITSL. Another personal philosophy is ensuring equal opportunity to all, while helping students from diverse cultural and linguistic background to be familiar in the learning environment. I attempt to treat them as individual student and identify their specific needs, based on which I develop their learning plan and help them to set goals for their career.

Teaching Mission Statement

I believe in continuous professional development through continuous learning. We can learn from everyone, everywhere. Sometimes, I learn some important aspects of life from my students also, which helps me to be up-to-date with the society. In this context, my colleagues, peers, family members also help me to keep myself up-to-date. It also helps me to understand the teaching content and strategies for the curriculum I teach. I like to gather new knowledge to enrich my knowledge base and apply those engaging learning and teaching programs. This philosophy support “standard 2.1 Content and teaching strategies of the teaching area” by AITSL.

One of my key philosophies in my professional area is setting goal along with the evaluation of the goal on the basis of the teaching content, strategies and student’s needs. However, I would not be able to attain my goals, until I successfully manage the classroom. Thus, I believe that managing the classroom is very important for meeting both students’ as well as my professional goals. In this context, I always prefer to build a trustworthy relationship with my students, which is the basis of understanding a student’s specific and additional needs. Promoting a positive and two-way communication helps students to feel valued and ask questions freely, thereby improving their knowledge base. I don’t believe in showing authority and maintaining a strict learning atmosphere in my classroom, rather I prefer to connect with each student at a very close level, where they can communicate about their interest and doubts freely, whereas respect me as well. For this I use the most relevant up-to-date strategies, which help to promote a strong relationship as well as build up a strong sense of their responsibilities in classroom. Through these philosophies I meet “standard 3, plan and implement effective teaching and learning by AITSL”. The collaborative learning is being promoted in the classroom by adopting this philosophy.

I have promoted the ‘learner-centred’ approach in my classroom, where learner’s interests and needs are being prioritized throughout the curriculum and everyday schedule. In addition, this key approach is followed by the collaborative and interactive approach in class. After identifying learner’s needs, I used to promote team work for improving their interaction with each other, because, I believe students can learn a lot of real-life aspects from each others, which can be implemented in future. In my entire career I always tried to emphasize my skills and abilities to meet the needs of service users or learner and collaborating with others made me able to promote the most effective strategies for learner’s benefit.

Learner centred approach keeps at the centre of learning activities, based on their needs, the curriculum is developed, which makes them to feel valued and improve their intellectual development. On the other hand, collaborative and interactive approach helps them to adopt social skills. On the other hand, continuous learning through the connecting their curriculum tasks with the real world improves their physical and cognitive development, which they would be able to implement in future.

As I have revealed in my personal philosophy that I don’t like to provide equal treatment to all, for this I always involve students in groups, where diverse cultural student take part and interact with each other to improve their knowledge base and complete curriculum activities. On the other hand, promoting two-way communication and building a strong and individualized relation with children, I prioritize specific needs of each student, their abilities and disabilities as well as their specific cultural needs.

Goals		Plans	Link with personal philosophy
To prepare the lesion plan for the class	Short term	Discuss the curriculum syllabus with other colleagues, meet individual student to understand their goals setting the curriculum plan considering specific needs for students , evaluation of the plan and setting time goal for achieving the goal	In my personal philosophy I have depicted that I follows the learner focused approach and consider every learner’s needs, based on which I plan the curriculum plan. To achieve this short term goal, I need to be focused on my personal philosophy.
To establish discipline in classroom	Short term	Arranging conversation with students as teams regarding the importance and impact of discipline upon their career growth. Discussing the disciplines and assisting them in understanding the ways of adopting them, evaluating their compliance, rewarding and praising students for complying the disciplinary rules	I have mentioned in classroom that I don’t like to show authority in class and promote strict ambiance in the classroom, rather I promote a strong relation build up, where students would feel free to communicate with me and show respect towards me as well as the entire educational system; combination of these philosophies embrace discipline concept among students
To create a positive learning environment and continuous development	Short term	Providing students opportunities to collaborate with each other regarding other student’s issues, continuously evaluating student’s performance in class and helping them at the areas of poor performance.	While discussing about the student-centred learning philosophies, I have mentioned that by building relationship and helping them to connect their work with the real life practices, I always attempt to establish a positive learning environment
To promote self-regulating behaviours	Long term	Set challenging goals, helping others in conflict situation and evaluating behaviour during these period, based on which further improvement in plan would be created	In my personal philosophies, I have depicted that I always attempt to evaluate my skills and abilities by approaching difficult and multitasking roles in my professional field and evaluate my skills based on my abilities, which aligns with this goal
Improve my communication skills	Long term	Meeting with parents and colleagues to improve communication skills, attend diverse language courses to improve	I have always prioritized communication as a key tool for improving individual’s skills and abilities and it improved through more and more interaction with different kinds of people
To align my professional goals with continuous professional development	Long term	Gathering information from everyone I meet in school as well as my community, using internet and other software to keep myself up-to-date, implementing knowledge gathered from the periphery in real life practices	Continuous professional development is one of the key philosophy I always follow, according to which I have made this goal, where I pledge for keeping myself up-to-date, even I have also mentioned that I sometimes learn from my fellow students also

Conclusion

In the current paper, I have discussed about my personal teaching philosophies, which are continuously helping me to climb up the ladder of my career in an easy and effective way. Based on my own teaching philosophies and approaches, I have developed short and long term goals for further improvement in my career and professional skills.

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