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Educational Philosophy Some things are better left stagnant and unchanging like, for example, a well-aged bottle of wine, but teaching is no chardonnay; teaching is a constantly evolving profession. Teaching the same way ten years from now is tantamount to the greatest of teaching sins because in order to deliver the best and most relevant education to our students, teachers need to keep their lessons as flexible and innovative as the technology-laden world around them. Technology is rapidly progressing at an unprecedented level, and our students are right there keeping pace with the latest technological trends; they are literally plugged-in to the world around them. At some schools, books and paper and pencil assignments are vanishing as iPads become the students consummate learning tool. Certainly, a teachers ten-year old lesson plans wouldnt have been able to take into account such a drastic change in the learning environment. For the most part, students respond positively to technology and, most importantly, are engaged by it, and an engaged student is a learning student. Because of this, the most important of teaching principles presides: A teacher must never stop learning. A teacher must be a pioneer in their field and a visionary. Instead of rejecting that which students embrace (i.e. facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, video games, cell phones, etc.), we should be incorporating such mediums into our lessons. One of the most profound implementations of such a technology that I witnessed was by one of my practicum teachers: Recognizing the potential pitfalls of using the actual facebook for a classroom assignment, he found and downloaded a completely customizable facebook template in which his students were required to construct a mock facebook profile for one of the characters in The Crucible. The enthusiasm for this assignment was universal throughout all of his classes, and the students were driven to make these mock profiles the best they possibly could not simply because they wanted a good letter grade but because they were completely caught up in the process; they were engaged. This is what teaching should look like now, in the 21st century: A blend of essentialist content with uncommon progressive techniques in which to approach the material. When I think back to my time in grade school, the classes that I remember the most, the ones that I enjoyed the most, were the ones that embraced multi-modal techniques and allowed for a great deal of personal freedom and creativity. I was engaged in these classes whether it was writing an epic poem featuring my own teachers and students, reenacting a scene from Oedipus (with plastic tridents, of course), designing TV commercials, creating a playlist profile, or even filming my own movies. Four years later, I still remember an extensive amount of Dantes Inferno because I had to analyze its every detail with the help of two classmates in order to make a cohesive movie for our final Senior English project, and this is the kind of learning that I will strive to replicate in my own classroom. However, the classroom is inherently full of diverse learners who are all engaged differently: kinesthetic, visual, auditory, and the like. Not every student will find making a movie engaging and some may view the prospect of reenacting a scene from a text as tortuous. Lessons should be equipped to handle such a diversity of learners in the classroom because even if a set of lessons takes one unique multi-modal approach to a subject, thats still only one approach and many students will be left disengaged. Simply-put, variety is essential to lesson design, and it is my goal to incorporate such a wide range of multimodal techniques into my lessons. Ive already designed lesson plans in my methods classes that incorporate using cell phones to translate Shakespeare into text-talk as a way of decoding the original meaning, identifying poetic language and techniques in modern songs, and filming

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mock interviews to complement the arduous process of the much dreaded research paper. I want my students to see how core material such as poetry, classic literature, and research essays, material that is often deemed boring by students, can be applicable to their own lives and, hey, maybe even a little fun! This can all be made possible by the use of technology and by an awareness of what the young learners in your classroom dig at the moment. Some teachers may look at a set of lesson plans that incorporate cell phones and facebook and think that students are just playing and not learning. This is the exact opposite of what actually occurs: These kinds of engaging activities allow students to think at a higher-level than many traditional approaches would require of them because they will be to take their new knowledge and apply it across multiple mediums and contexts. If students are living in the 21st century, then we might as well have them think like theyre in the 21st century! To support this kind of high-level of thinking, the classroom must be a collaborative-learning environment in which continuous feedback and support is a necessity. From middle school all the way to the college-level, Ive witnessed firsthand the pitfalls of the disengaged lecture-based classroom. The teacher becomes simply a fountain of information in which the students can only receive. The classroom should not follow this archaic set-up but instead follow more in the vein of a writing workshop: Students become part of a community of learners that is supported by a more circular class design that fosters discussion and constructive feedback. In this design, the teacher is not the focal point of the class; the students are. Ive developed this opinion during my time as an AVID tutor for the West Fargo School District. The AVID program focuses on prepping students for college by striving to craft them into independent critical thinkers, and we, as the tutors, attempt to accomplish this by engaging the students in a tutorial process that revolves around them, not the tutor. They assemble into half-circles to support the community environment, and they help each other to reach an answer by asking probing questions and by truly discussing the question at hand, not just by blurting out the answer (well, most of the time anyways). This set-up is applicable to the larger classroom as well because it fosters students to analyze information and think critically about how to reach a solution. In essence, the teacher, while still the authoritative figure, becomes the mediator of discussion and not a lecturer of information. I have to admit, there is a tinge of irony that perpetrates this entire philosophy of mine. In likely only a few years or maybe less, new technologies will have been developed that will inevitably change some aspect of the field of education, and much like the iPads mentioned earlier, they will be technologies that will make impacts on the classroom that I could never have anticipated. However, thats the beauty of education because the learning never stops, and there is a sense of discovery as you find new ways in which to implement lessons or apply age-old concepts with modern methods. Despite the changes that will inevitably come, the base idea will remain: engage students with relevant ideas and a touch of the technologically-savvy. This is one immovable idea that, like well-aged chardonnay, will only improve with age as new technologies applicable to the classroom are introduced.