I was not someone who knew they wanted to be a teacher when they were young.

Until
high school, I did not know what I wanted to do, just that I wanted to help people. After
spending my last two years of high school helping in our life skills and autistic support
classrooms, I realized I wanted to be a special education teacher. Going through college, I
had experiences in many different classrooms but thrived in my middle school emotional
support student teaching placement which helped me realize I want to be a secondary
emotional support teacher. Going through school, facing many adversities in my own
personal life, I hope to be a teacher who puts emphasis on social-emotional learning
because this is what I needed in my teachers as a child.
My philosophy of education is largely based on theories from B. F. Skinner and Howard
Gardner. B. F. Skinner’s research and publications on behaviorism largely shape how I
choose to run my classroom. Behaviorism states that positive reinforcement strengthens a
behavior and negative reinforcement pushes a child away from said behavior. I utilized parts
of this theory in my student teaching placement in a middle school emotional support
classroom. We used a modified token economy, relying heavily on positive reinforcement.
Negative reinforcement was not used as much. I saw firsthand the positive correlation
between positive reinforcement and expected behaviors. Especially teaching in a behavior-
centric class, B. F. Skinner’s theories were useful for me to implement in the classroom.
Finally, Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory is extremely important in my
classroom. The theory of multiple intelligences states that humans have several ways of
processing information. We see this all throughout development. Babies process information
in a completely different way than an adult does, and all children and adults process
information differently than one another. I utilize the multiple intelligences theory in my
classroom by presenting content in multiple different ways in order to reach each and every
student in my room. For students who are musical and process information in a musical way,
lecturing would not be beneficial. However, if a class is presented with information about the
Declaration of Independence in the form of a song, acting in a skit, PowerPoint, independent
reading, and a hands-on project, each and every student in my classroom is more likely to
understand the information they have been presented with.
Based on my own personal experiences as a student teacher in middle and elementary
school, I give little homework. I believe homework in elementary school does more harm
than good. Students are forced to put family time and being a kid on the back burner when
given homework in each content area every night. While student teaching in my second
grade classroom, the students had two pages of math homework a night and a packet of
writing homework each week. Students struggled with this and then lost recess time if
homework was not completed. In my middle school emotional support placement for
student teaching, we gave no homework and instead focused on behaviors, which proved to
work well for the students in the class. In my future classroom, I would limit homework to
only what is absolutely necessary.
I approach being a teacher by looking through multiple lenses. As a trauma-informed
teacher, I aim to have a warm, welcoming classroom where each and every student feels
comfortable coming to me for academic and social-emotional help.