Teaching Philosophy

I agree with author John Steinbeck’s suggestion that teaching might be the greatest of arts because its medium is the human mind and spirit. In every teaching/learning encounter, I am committed to bringing equal measures of rigor and enthusiasm; I am endlessly seeking the best ways to bring both to fruition.

In his most recent book, The Discipline of Hope, veteran educator Herbert Kohl has this to say about his teaching:

…I've tried to make my teaching both rooted in its time and beyond and bigger than its time. I want to help students know who and where they are, but I also want them to share what other people know, what work they do, what wonders people have already created in science, culture, and the arts. I want students to explore learning through doing but also through reflection and hard study. I want them to learn hard skills in soft ways.  Most of all, I want my students…to feel part of a compassionate learning community where they are honored as individuals, where they respect each other, and where they respect and love learning itself. In other words, I want it all (1998, p. 17-18).

Kohl's views, especially with regard to the creation of compassionate learning communities and the combination of "learning through doing" with reflection and hard study, align well with my own teaching philosophy. My main criteria for teaching excellence which have evolved throughout my teaching career that spans my entire adult lifetime include:

• Creating a lively, compassionate community of inquiry where students share the responsibility for the success of the class.

• Encouraging students to collaborate rather than compete and to analyze rather than describe.

• Extending the classroom walls to local, national, and global communities and bringing "experts" to the classroom.

• Challenging students to design, plan, implement, evaluate, and present original inquiry.

• Expecting students to think critically and write analytically and to entertain the "big" questions that influence teaching practices, methodologies, and educational policies.

• Offering opportunities to use technology as a means (rather than an end) to extend knowledge.

• Engaging students in on-going critical conversations about power and privilege and how they influence social interactions and contribute to structures of inequality in schools and other social institutions.

• Assisting students to identify the larger social structures and cultural practices, both in the past and present, which will impact their teaching/learning interactions and influence their own development as cultural beings.

• Encouraging students to embrace questions that enable them to work toward answers that will lead to deeper questions.