My personal philosophy of teaching…I want to make a difference!

This might be making a difference to a young person’s understanding of a school subject or making a young person believe in their ability to do something better or just making sure that a young person knows that someone is listening but ultimately I want to make a difference.

I prefer to think about ‘learning and teaching’ rather than ‘teaching and learning’. This may seem a little pedantic, however, I always start with the learning…what are the learners going to be learning or what do they need and want to learn? There has to be a reason for learning, a purpose, or else what is the point? This does not mean that learning has to be practical and useful all of the time, and what one person learns will not be the same as someone else, but it must be meaningful to that individual. Therefore it is no coincidence that the principles of curriculum design in Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) (Education Scotland, no date) include relevance, challenge and enjoyment and personalisation and choice. Learning must be relevant to the lives that children, young people and adults are living now and will be living in the future and help them to get the best out of themselves.

Only once the learning has been identified do I think about how I am going to teach. How I teach depends on my audience, on what I am teaching and the purpose of that teaching. There are times when you have to lecture to transfer knowledge. There are times when it is important for the learners to investigate and learn through their own experience. There are times where it is vital that learners learn together and other times for them to work on their own. Consequently, in my teaching I use a variety of teaching strategies, organisational strategies and modes of delivery.

I believe that a CPD session is a successful one if I can take one thing away from that session and implement it immediately in my practice the next day. This does not need to be a strategy or a worksheet but it could be a thought that provokes me to reconsider a way of thinking or being. When I am planning and preparing teaching inputs I consider how useful the learning will be and how I would use it, in order to understand the potential impact it will have for my learners.

My justification for teaching using different strategies and varying how I teach different groups is that ultimately it is my responsibility to enthuse, motivate and teach my learners by adjusting how I work.

I want to give my learners the best possible start on their learning journey and to encourage them to become self-motivated seekers of how to make things different and better.

References

Education Scotland (no date) Principles of Curriculum Design. Available at: http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/learningandteaching/thecurriculum/howisthecurriculumorganised/principles/index.asp (Accessed: 3 May 2016).