Personal Teaching Philosophy

As an instructor, my teaching is centered around ground-up focused, experiential learning. Introducing essential concepts and providing perspective should be the first steps of any effective learning. Then, providing tactile experiences for those concepts to be shown through personal interaction should be added to those concepts. Once those two steps are provided, the student usually has enough knowledge and experience to begin refining the information and can begin making sense of relationships with a few guiding questions and examples. Students learn in different ways and at different paces, this allows me to adjust my teaching so that the process is most effective for the given population of students. The given instructional steps are provided in the given order, however, the pace at which each step takes place is mostly dependent on the student. My goal is to give these experiential learning events that can have students directly interact with the concepts that they are learning so that they can effectively intake the knowledge in a way that makes sense to them.

In Practice

In my own education, I have historically struggled in a classroom environment as lecture-style learning and traditional schooling have never been very effective in my own learning. This inspires me to take a different approach to education. I understand that because traditional schooling is somewhat different from my own instruction this desire for the instructor to lecture a student can be expected by students. I however believe that allowing for critical thinking to put the pieces of the problems together allows students to develop a more personalized relationship with the material that I am teaching them.

A great example of this is a day that I spent with a student who was described as challenging in a classroom setting by their science teacher. Taking advantage of the setting of my lesson, being outdoors, I figured that I had some tools that I could use to my advantage to connect this student with their learning. At first, things did not go very well, starting our day practicing sit spots as a part of our climate justice lesson, this student was cold and miserable on a rainy day as they just didn’t seem to want to be there. It was so bad that they were crying at one point in the lesson. In my teaching, I had to alter my approach more to relate these lessons to this student. They began showing more interest in the hard science-related lessons which allowed them to have more autonomy in their experiments. I began to reinforce the good habits that they showed as the more they felt like they were succeeding the more present their mind became. By the end of the day this student who started off not wanting to be on the field trip, asked myself and my instructor if H.J. Andrews had jobs that they could eventually take on as they got older. Their connection to the lessons and the concept of nature and connectedness changed so much that they had a true passion to take part in this place and these practices of science long term.