Be The Best You Can Be :: Philosophy of Education Statement Teaching Essays

Be The Best You Can Be A person begins to learn from the moment they enter the earth and do not stop learning until they die. As an educator I feel it will be my job to teach my students to be self-motivated learners. Eventually my students will have to learn new skills in jobs and in life without a teacher there to guide them. In my elementary classroom creating self-motivated learners will be my ultimate goal. In order to do this I will have to use a variety of teaching philosophies and approaches, effective classroom management, and I will have to build relationships with my students. I would describe my teaching philosophy as eclectic. I find that components of the five major philosophies, essentialism, progressivism, perennialism, existentialism, and behaviorism, fit into how I feel about teaching. The essentials such as respect for each other and the basic subjects, such as reading and math, are very important to me as a teacher. Individuality, active participation, cooperative learning and developing social skill are some of the progressive ideas I will use in my classroom. For my students to become self-motivated learners they will need to be able to reason, as suggested in perennialism. Reasoning will help them to work through problems and make decisions. Existentialism states that students should accept responsibility for their actions and should be self-paced. These ideas are important to my philosophy of self-motivated learners because my goal will be to create students who can do what this philosophy states. Behaviorism supports the use of positive and negative reinforcement, both of which I believe will be essential to my classroom. These five theories put together describe my eclectic teaching philosophy. I believe that using a variety of teaching approaches and methods will be crucial in classroom. America is a very diverse country that is home to many different types of people, therefore, I except for my classroom to be fully diverse also. With many different types of people there will be come many different types of learning styles. And of course my class will include children with learning disabilities and with the movement of full inclusion, my class will contain students with other types of disabilities.