My teaching Philosophy

My philosophy of teaching evolves from my experiences as a student, as a teacher and knowledge I have acquired about teaching and learning from various sources.

In my view learning is acquiring knowledge though various means and ways and changing an individual’s perception about the world and what happens in the world as a result of learning. Learning can take place through experience, through collecting information and even by interacting with people. 

As being a teacher I am responsible for developing an individual who is acceptable in the society and who is able to live a respectable life and seek the opportunities for further development of the society and the person. In my view to accomplish the above vision of teaching, teaching should be meaningful. It should not be like indoctrinations rather it should make meaning to the learner. Teachers should not be teaching solutions for the problems rather teaching should be to teach how to solve the problems. In other words teachers should be clock builders rather than time tellers.

In my teaching philosophy it is essential for a teacher to have close; positive relation with the students. This healthy relationship should help the teacher to know the problems faced by students and it should help the students to build trust with the teacher and clarify teacher’s expectations about them. Further a similar healthy relationship should be built and maintained with the parents of the students too.

In my opinion, giving a set of notes and worksheets for revision with model answers and asking the students to memories that is not, effective. That may be enough for a person teaching for grades, but that cannot be teaching for understanding. Therefore I would prefer to make the students understand the underlying concepts in the various disciplines though use of various means such as Co operative learning, Modeling, observation, Social interactions and so on.

Further my teaching philosophy is capitalizing on my strengths and making the students more responsible learners in order to achieve the above vision of teaching. Detailed clear explanations, Good modeling, ability to develop healthy relationship with students and parents are some of my strengths and designing lessons including various activities and promoting co operative learning with scaffolding can assist me in making learning meaningful. Added making possible connections to real life and bringing up possible local examples makes the learning more meaningful. I am also proud to notice that I my classes’ day to day events that take place in the society, country and the world are discussed in context thus enabling learners to understand the usefulness of the content in hand.

                                                                  

Note: This philosophy is aimed at teaching in Maldivian schools at the level of secondary (grades 8, 9 and 10).

Pedagogy and learning theories

Pedagogy is an art. It is a science or it may even be craft of teaching children. The term “Pedagogy” came from a Greek word “Paidagōgeō” that has the literal meaning tend the child or lead the child (Smith, 2012). Similarly (Pedagogy, 2013) defines pedagogy as study of teaching methods together with the educational aims and how they may be achieved. Therefore in overall we could understand that pedagogy is the teaching methods, techniques and strategies; all together more specifically concerned with teaching children.

It is very clear that in order to develop Pedagogy, we should understand how children learn. The various learning theories that explain children learning is very important. Knowledge of all the main theories is important as no one theory is perfect in explaining children’s learning. Further knowing about different learning styles and being able to identify different children’s learning styles is important too.

Some key learning theories that explain a child’s learning are Behaviorism  Information Processing and Social cognition. Behaviorism focuses on systematic analysis of antecedence and consequence of behavior in changing behavior. This is based on the behaviorist definition of learning. They define learning as a change in behavior  Likewise Information processing theory, focus on how attention, perception, representation and knowledge affect problem solving and memory. On the other hand social cognitive theory of learning concerned about the interactive effects of behavior  environment and personal in learning (Woolfolk, 2010).  

Works Cited

v  Pedagogy. (2013, February 28). Retrieved from Britannica: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/448410/pedagogy

   v  Smith, M. K. (2012). ‘What is pedagogy?’, the encyclopaedia of informal education.

                 www.infed.org/whatis/what_is_pedagogy.html. Retrieved: on 28 February 2013

v  Woolfolk, A. (2010). Educational Psychology. Pearson Education Inc.