Artifacts 4-Teaching Philosophy

Yiran Liao

When I think about teaching, I believe that teaching is a profession to inspire others.
Being a teacher not only need to acquire the ability to manage a classroom like setting
up rewards system, establishing rules, disciplines and procedures, but also need to to
make sure students have a well-organized, encouraging and positive learning
environment. The goal of teaching is to ensure that students can study in a caring and
orderly environment and finally to not only help students to achieve academic
learning improvement, but also foster their social and emotional growth.

There are four principles in my teaching philosophy. First of all, a benchmark of good
teaching is acquiring classroom management skills, thus teacher needs to set specific
rules, routines and procedures and consistently follow through. By setting up and
following through rules, routines and procedures, students can understand more about
the expectations from the teacher. It is also helpful for the smooth running of learning
and teaching. Besides, effective classroom management can maintain appropriate
students’ behavior. In order to reinforce students’ good behaviors and reduce bad
behaviors, teacher can set up positive and negative consequences, enforce classroom’s
rules promptly and consistently from the very beginning of the school year.

The second principle is building a good relationship with students. That means
teacher should always be responsive to students, understand each student personality
and care about them. It is important to build a trustworthy and respectful classroom
environment, thus students can be safe and willing to learn from the teacher.

The third principle is to evoke students’ internal learning motivation. The primary
method is to let students find learning is interesting and funny, students can acquire
pleasant and satisfaction from learning, then they are willing to learn. Moreover,
when students find they can apply what they learned into real life, they will show
bigger enthusiasm in learning the content. For example, if teacher uses coins to
explain the rules of addition, students learned more effectively. Another way to evoke
students’ internal learning motivation is to promote critical thinking skills. In order to
cultivate independent thinking, instead of just rotten memorization, I encourage
students to ask me questions at the beginning of the class. I believe digging out
questions is a good way to improve critical thinking skills. I also tried an activity
named chalk talk to let students walk around the classroom to observe different
pictures about Chinese culture, then they need to think and write down their thoughts
on the chart paper, they can read and comment on others’ thoughts before the whole
class start discussion.
Last but not least, the forth principle of my teaching philosophy is inspiring others.
Different from other careers, education can touch students deep inside. I believe
teaching can inspire students’ spirits. To some extent, a teacher is like a role model
for the students. If a teacher shows merits like being positive and creative the students
will be influenced by the teacher and become positive and creative as well. I was
inspired by one of my teachers when I was young. Once I felt very upset because of
my terrible score, my teacher told me score meant nothing, but the effort I showed as
well as the methods that I used to learn were important. Everyone could suffer
frustration, the key to overcome frustration was to be brave and face it. Now, as a
teacher, I will try my best to give high expectations to all of my students, and inspire
the spirits of them just like what my teacher taught me before.

I found the most effective teachers are fair, optimistic and determined, they can be
friendly to students and at the same time be firm and strict of following rules.
Compared with other effective teachers, I think my strengths are always showing
positive attitudes and can be caring and friendly to students. I used to think I was bad
at consistently following through my classroom rules and procedures, but now I
change my thought and be more confident about myself, not only because I know I’m
just learning now, but also because I acquire knowledge from my master courses and
practices from last year’s teaching experiences. I may also encounter several
challenges when I try to imply my teaching philosophy in my future class, but I have
courage to overcome.