Teaching Philosophy
My passion for education comes from my own thirst for liberation, and I believe that project based learning intertwined with culturally responsive pedagogy is the best educational path towards liberation. I believe that any good project emerges from what the students themselves bring to the classroom. As students' whole selves become the focal points of the classroom, the power in the classroom is shared more equitably between teacher and students. Using this equitable power structure as an engine, the class is driven to create projects that address issues of inequality in the world around them. My life’s project has become to provide this educational opportunity to students who would not have this privilege otherwise.
My Year as a Teaching Apprentice
Originally from Nebraska, with stops in Mexico, Spain, Portland, and LA, I had to search far and wide to find this opportunity as a Teaching Apprentice at High Tech High. I am here because I fortuitously saw a documentary in Portland called Most Likely to Succeed wherein I learned that HTH was a school that embodied the ideals of Project Based Learning. From that time forward, I have strived to become involved here—someway, somehow. That way and how became clear after visiting HTH from LA last year; it was on this visit when I heard about the TAP program (I didn’t move to California just to be closer to HTH, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a motivating factor). I say all this to point out, I entered this year as a HTH fanboy and that we share a lot of the same values, HTH and I. Because of this, I believe that my greatest strengths as a teacher are my personal strengths that I brought into this year, and which, over the course of the year, HTH has strengthened within me. These said strengths are my focus on creating relationships with students and my desire to create a more just world through education.
My focus on relationships stems from the love I feel towards others and the genuine joy I receive by getting to know them. As Ben Daley was told many years ago as a summer camp counselor, “You gotta like the kids!” This is not all that is required of a good teacher, but I agree that it is foundational to the work we do. This has been reinforced again and again this year, whether it is talking about SEL and building community, or using cultural funds of knowledge and being a warm demander. The relationship always comes first. A key part of the relationship is how it pushes me to push my students. Because I care about them, I want them to do their best in all they do. I want them to learn the academic skills and habits that will allow them to pursue their life’s work. My relationships with my students gives me insight about how to better reach them, while at the same times serves as the basis for the academic rigor within the classroom that I provide.
The other strength I brought to and built on this year is my desire for a more just world. It is this desire for justice that has guided my adult life and the choices I have made. While the desire for justice is important, this year I have actually been able to implement specific practices that will help me create the type of classroom I envision. I have divided these justice-based practices into two categories. First, there are practices which decentralize the role of the teacher in the classroom and empower students to become active participants in their own learning. Some examples of these are noticing language, open-ended questions, relying on students’ funds of knowledge, and operating the classroom as a cogenerative space between teacher and student. Secondly, there are the practices that the teacher can do to push their students to examine equity issues in the world around them, some examples would be the teacher bringing one’s own identity into the classroom, teaching critical narratives/disrupting dominant narratives, and doing authentic work that addresses an issue of equity. These are all practices I have tried in my classroom this year, but they will require an entire life’s work to truly master. I look forward to this life’s work, which is why my desire for a more just world is one of my greatest strengths.
As opposed to my strengths, my greatest areas of growth are things I have learned about only this year that I know I need to spend time improving upon. I believe that these two areas are taking a detail-oriented approach to my planning and providing scaffolding off of which all students are able to achieve. My first growth area is the flipside of strength of mine, thinking big. I love to consider big ideas questions about life, but I noticed that the big ideas I had for lesson plans would often get snagged by a detail I had overlooked. I made a graphic organizer for one portion of the assignment but not the other, and the students were cast into confusion. I forgot to write out the instructions on the assignment sheet itself, so even though I have given instructions orally, half the room isn’t sure what is going on. Once I realize what details I have overlooked, I can often course correct for the next class, but I would like to get to the point where I can do this without using 1st period as a guinea pig.
My second area of growth is related to the first in that scaffolding is something that one has to be very mindful and meticulous about. This year, I have learned a wide variety of scaffolds which can be used for student engagement, representation, and expression. I have practiced connecting lessons to prior learning, emphasizing relevance, using sentence starters and graphic organizers, chunking material, and preteaching key concepts and vocabulary. That being said, I feel that I have so much more room to grow in this area, and part of what makes this area of growth so critical for me to improve in is that I won’t possibly have an equitable classroom unless the learning is accessible to all of my students.
Moving into the second year of the Teaching Apprenticeship Program, my desire to improve in the area of scaffolding guides my first potential question which could be the basis of my master’s thesis. That is, how might I use scaffolding to ensure that learning is accessible to all students? This is a natural question that I will be pursuing in my practice anyway, and although it’s broad, I would be interested to see what specific practices—and hopefully beneficial results—would come from it. My other potential guiding question is connected to my desire to create a more just world through my teaching, and that is, how might I use participatory action research with my students to raise their critical consciousness? I see participatory action research as a methodology that is directly connected to raising student’s awareness of the world around them and their agency within it, which would be a good encapsulation of my overall goal as a teacher.
My focus on relationships stems from the love I feel towards others and the genuine joy I receive by getting to know them. As Ben Daley was told many years ago as a summer camp counselor, “You gotta like the kids!” This is not all that is required of a good teacher, but I agree that it is foundational to the work we do. This has been reinforced again and again this year, whether it is talking about SEL and building community, or using cultural funds of knowledge and being a warm demander. The relationship always comes first. A key part of the relationship is how it pushes me to push my students. Because I care about them, I want them to do their best in all they do. I want them to learn the academic skills and habits that will allow them to pursue their life’s work. My relationships with my students gives me insight about how to better reach them, while at the same times serves as the basis for the academic rigor within the classroom that I provide.
The other strength I brought to and built on this year is my desire for a more just world. It is this desire for justice that has guided my adult life and the choices I have made. While the desire for justice is important, this year I have actually been able to implement specific practices that will help me create the type of classroom I envision. I have divided these justice-based practices into two categories. First, there are practices which decentralize the role of the teacher in the classroom and empower students to become active participants in their own learning. Some examples of these are noticing language, open-ended questions, relying on students’ funds of knowledge, and operating the classroom as a cogenerative space between teacher and student. Secondly, there are the practices that the teacher can do to push their students to examine equity issues in the world around them, some examples would be the teacher bringing one’s own identity into the classroom, teaching critical narratives/disrupting dominant narratives, and doing authentic work that addresses an issue of equity. These are all practices I have tried in my classroom this year, but they will require an entire life’s work to truly master. I look forward to this life’s work, which is why my desire for a more just world is one of my greatest strengths.
As opposed to my strengths, my greatest areas of growth are things I have learned about only this year that I know I need to spend time improving upon. I believe that these two areas are taking a detail-oriented approach to my planning and providing scaffolding off of which all students are able to achieve. My first growth area is the flipside of strength of mine, thinking big. I love to consider big ideas questions about life, but I noticed that the big ideas I had for lesson plans would often get snagged by a detail I had overlooked. I made a graphic organizer for one portion of the assignment but not the other, and the students were cast into confusion. I forgot to write out the instructions on the assignment sheet itself, so even though I have given instructions orally, half the room isn’t sure what is going on. Once I realize what details I have overlooked, I can often course correct for the next class, but I would like to get to the point where I can do this without using 1st period as a guinea pig.
My second area of growth is related to the first in that scaffolding is something that one has to be very mindful and meticulous about. This year, I have learned a wide variety of scaffolds which can be used for student engagement, representation, and expression. I have practiced connecting lessons to prior learning, emphasizing relevance, using sentence starters and graphic organizers, chunking material, and preteaching key concepts and vocabulary. That being said, I feel that I have so much more room to grow in this area, and part of what makes this area of growth so critical for me to improve in is that I won’t possibly have an equitable classroom unless the learning is accessible to all of my students.
Moving into the second year of the Teaching Apprenticeship Program, my desire to improve in the area of scaffolding guides my first potential question which could be the basis of my master’s thesis. That is, how might I use scaffolding to ensure that learning is accessible to all students? This is a natural question that I will be pursuing in my practice anyway, and although it’s broad, I would be interested to see what specific practices—and hopefully beneficial results—would come from it. My other potential guiding question is connected to my desire to create a more just world through my teaching, and that is, how might I use participatory action research with my students to raise their critical consciousness? I see participatory action research as a methodology that is directly connected to raising student’s awareness of the world around them and their agency within it, which would be a good encapsulation of my overall goal as a teacher.
Lake Tahoe, Nevada