Dylan Abraham

Teaching Philosophy
Living in modern times, teaching can no longer simply be a
teacher standing in the front of the room giving a lecture to his
students. While lecture is a component of teaching, instruction must be
focused on the learner.
I strive to facilitate learning in the classroom by providing
students with meaningful activities and learning experiences that not
only cover material, but also are engaging and applicable to life after
school. In practice, this would lead to a classroom environment where
most of the time, Im not just talking to my students about math or
physics, but rather, my students are doing math and physics. My role
in the classroom would be that of a facilitator, someone who guides
learning and provides assistance when necessary. A typical day would
have an introduction to the lesson, following which students would be
free to work through that days task.
To evaluate my students, I would use in part traditional
summative assessments, but also provide my students opportunities to
demonstrate their competency through projects or other performance
tasks; and it is critical that I keep watch on my students progress
through formative assessments, from reviewing their work to
conversing with them during class to tickets out the door. The bulk of
the grades that I assign would be for the performance-tasks, the
summative portion, as I believe that a grade should reflect a students
knowledge of the content, in order to inform future instruction.
I also believe it is important to use technology to enhance
student learning. It is the 21st century now, and failing to teach our
students how to use technology productively is to fail to prepare them
for the real world. This would in my classroom take the form of such
things as calculator skills, knowing when it is appropriate to use a
calculator and how it can save you tedious and unnecessary
calculations that detract from the point of the lesson; or using dynamic
geometry software to rapidly generate examples to test a conjecture
and decide if it is false or worth trying to prove.
Finally, I believe that no matter where each student stands when
they come into my classroom, it is my duty as an educator to push all
of my students to the highest they can achieve: for some students,
even advanced proficiency will come easily and they will require
additional challenges, for others, everything we do may be a struggle.
Regardless of this, I will need to provide the additional challenges and
scaffold the material so that all of my students reach the peak of their

Dylan Abraham
potential. Each of my students will have unique needs, and as an
educator, it is my responsibility to meet them.