Running head: PHILOSOPHY OF TEACHING STATEMENT 1

Philosophy of Teaching Statement

Art of Effective Teaching

Kayla Hopkins

Mount Aloysius College

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Ever since I was a young girl, my sister and I would always play school, I would play the

role as the teacher and she would play the student. I would teach her new lessons on the chalk

board I got for Christmas and even come up with different test that I could grade after she took

them. We would play school almost every day in the summer months and I remember how

rewarding it felt when she started to understand the math concepts that I would teach her. As

time past and we got older we fell out of playing school and got preoccupied with other things.

It was not until my freshman year of high school when I really thought about becoming a future

educator. During my English class freshman year of high school, my teacher explained that you

should go to school for something you are passionate about, something that as a kid you would

always play, that’s how you know you are passionate about something. I thought back and

remembered how much we loved playing school and how much I loved pretending I was a

teacher. However, I was blinded by how much the teaching salary was and immediately

dismissed the idea without giving it any though. That was until one day, I was tutoring a young

girl I babysat for in math, she was not understanding the concept and after working with her for

some time she finally understood. It felt so rewarding knowing I helped her understand the

material, I then knew teaching was my calling and it was something I had to pursue. As I

continued my studies, I began to understand that there is more to teaching than being passionate,

but it takes certain qualities and devotion to be a successful teacher.

Having good classroom management is particularly important when running a classroom

by yourself. The classroom should be clean and organized so all of your students know where

everything is, that way they are efficient in their learning. It is important for an educator to

introduce their policies during the first day of school to their students and reflect them through

the rest of the year. If not, their classroom can become chaotic and it is hard to regain the control
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of the students. During the first few weeks it is important to be strict in the policies you create

and then start to loosen up giving some leniency. One thing that I find beneficial to classroom

management includes, allowing the student to come up with the classroom rules, this tells the

students that this is their classroom as well as mine, and the students will respect the rules they

create rather than a teacher forcing rules upon them. The classroom management strategy relates

to different effective teaching strategies that benefits many different types of learners.

There are many different teaching strategies that work for many different types of

students. As a teacher it is important to know the teaching strategies that are effective towards

your students. To ensure the students are getting the most out of a lesson you must adapt your

lessons based upon the types of learners in the classroom as well as use a multi-scenario

approach when developing your lesson plans. Each student learns in a different way, and you

cannot just create one lesson and expect each and every student in the class to understand the

material right away. As an educator it is imperative for the teacher to constantly be adapting to

what their students need as well as plan your lessons ahead and incorporate different ways of

adapting your lesson plans to the different types of learners in your classroom. This is also

important for the multicultural students in your classroom as well.

There are many benefits from creating a multicultural environment in your classroom. If

there are multicultural students in your room, they feel welcomed and apart of the class, if not

the students are exposed to different cultures and develop and understand of people who different

from them. To make the classroom more multicultural, I will create a multiple culture bulletin

board strictly to give information about other cultures around the world. On this board I will

include a map of the world and its oceans, each week I will highlight a different country on the

map and give highlights about the cultural that I will go over with the students. Doing this each
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week can develop the students understanding of different cultures and help the student relate to

the different ethnicities they may be a part of. They can even dig deeper and reflect on these

different cultures using the technology in the classroom.

Technology is on the rise and does not show any signs of stopping, it is important to start

intergrading technology into the classroom, so the students have a better opportunity of learning

how to use it properly. One way you can intergrade technology into the classroom and connect

students to new learning styles is by allowing students to communicate through technology when

working on collaboration projects and assignments. This will promote appropriate use of

technology and can even learn to assessing students through technology.

All students need to be assessed so that there is evidence of learning, however, many

believe standardized testing is important to introduce to students at a young age. I believe there

are other methods of testing that can take place other than standardized tests. Standardized

testing is important to prepare students for their state tests starting in third grade, but there are

other methods of testing the students to ensure their understanding of the material. I believe

students should be tested in many different ways to show their understanding such as different

projects and presentations as well ass standardized testing to prepare them for future state tests.

No teacher is perfect going into their first year of teaching, it takes trial and error to

understand what type of teaching methods work best for you and your students. However, there

are many classroom management skill and teaching strategies that I believe are more effective

than others. I also feel having a multicultural classroom and intergrading technology in your

classroom is important for the students to develop a new understand of growing ideas in the

world. There are also many different ways of assessing students to ensure the understand the

material being presented to them.