My Teaching Philosophy

My Teaching Philosophy

  I believe that the ultimate purpose of teaching is to enhance learning. Learning takes place in different situations and contexts. Everyone is capable of learning, but I think that a student who goes to school and continues his/her higher education has a special desire deep down to acquire new knowledge and skills. Every student has his/her own way of learning, some are auditory learners, others visual, or kinesthetic, or tactile, etc., he/she can even have the combination of these styles. I think whatever the style is, by creating a positive classroom environment and using the effective strategies I can reach every student.

  As a teacher I believe that I have a role in shaping my students’ minds and thereby affecting their characters, relationships that they build with others, and the role that they can have later in society.  And since I know that students can sometimes imitate their teachers and take examples from their actions, words, etc... I must be careful to the way I react with them. I want to show my students that biology is authentic; it is related to every aspect of their life. If I explain the material with enthusiasm, and show interest and passion in what I’m teaching, I’m sure that the students will be also motivated to learn. I think including feelings to a certain extant adds more authenticity to the teaching. By feelings I mean, sharing their happiness, when they have problem discuss it with them and help them in finding solution, and the most important thing is, in my opinion, to show them respect, because if they see that their teacher is respecting them, they will build a good motive to respect the people around them, because I want to foster students who are aware of the differences found around them and yet have respect to the concept of diversity. And I think that when I enter the classroom I must be detached from outside thoughts and feelings that I have and focus on the needs of my students only.

I want to be a teacher, because I love to work with students, I see a passion in them to acquire new knowledge and skills. I don’t believe that there are “lazy” students, if the teacher is able to motivate the students in the subject, every student will have interest in completing whatever is necessary to achieve the set goals, because I think that whatever the subject is, it can be explained in an easy or simple way to facilitate more understanding by the students.

In general I have a passion to guide people through their problems, or in any other case, and I chose teaching because it’s all about guidance. I don’t see teaching as a profession where as a teacher I will be the superior one and everything that I say has to be done by the student. I believe that teaching is all about guiding the student through a long way where he/she will build concepts, skills, which will affect the way this student will think and will build his/her character and will be able to make decisions on his/her own.

As a conclusion, I want to tell my students that learning is a process that never ends, and I want to create in them a passion for learning. And as a teacher, being aware of this fact, I will continue to improve my teaching through reading articles from accredited professional journals, using the internet to get familiarized with new strategies that I can use, and whenever possible, I want to attend workshops and seminars considering the field of biology education and education as a whole… In addition to assessing the students for their knowledge and skills, I have to assess my performance, I have to reflect on each session that I thought, on the effectiveness of the strategies and the activities that I used, and analyze how the students reacted to each method and activity used. In addition to the personal reflection that I will do, I want to have group reflections with other colleagues, biology teachers or other subject teachers, because I believe that I can benefit also from their experiences and together we can enhance student learning and advancement in more fruitful way.