EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY

The Landscape of Teaching: 

A Journey of Experience and Reflection

       I am a teacher.  There have been moments in my teaching life where I have felt inexplicable joy in my classroom:  My students and I pursuing, freely and easily, questions and answers, finding joy in ideas of true interest to us.  Other times, I remember as more of a struggle.  Days when things didn’t go as planned.  When I wondered why I thought of myself as having something to offer them at all.  But what I have learned along the way is that teaching is a journey, one of good and not so good days, days of learning, days with tangles, days of whats, hows and whys, but above all, days of goodness and light. 

       From the writing teacher’s perspective, my goal has been to get students to translate what they see and feel using words that give their observations and feelings language.  Not just any language, but a language that transforms, and pulls from them something more than they thought possible.  Once a student believes he or she has something valuable to say, the experience translates itself into other areas, both in and beyond the classroom setting.

       Thus came my move from out of the classroom, and in to the administrative role.  I have always yearned to collaborate.  My best teaching happened because of learning from professors, colleagues, and my students.  I wanted to be a voice in the larger conversation of what it is that makes the educational journey of a child have substance and meaning. What it is that transforms learning for them, like the words on the pages from my students, into something authentic and meaningful, changing them for the better.   This requires constant planning, examining, experimenting, looking at experiences and reflecting on how to move further, engaging them as active learners and knowledge seekers.  There are no endings.  No one answer.  There is only the journey.  Only the trying.