Example Teaching Philosophy

As a student, the best teachers were those who had very good conceptual understanding of the subject matter. However, I also experienced teachers with good content knowledge, but were not effective in their teaching. Many of those teachers fed us with information and required us to reproduce given information and show procedures and did not undertake to determine whether we understood what they taught. We were not encouraged to think or express ourselves. In my teaching experience, my conceptual understanding of the subject matter is not sufficient to ensure students are learning. Students active involvement in learning is very much dependent on the teacher's experience, pedagogical and content knowledge, which the teacher utilises to select appropriate, interesting and stimulating activities/tasks. From my experiences, the selection of appropriate activities is needed to motivate students to be actively involved during teaching session. I break the class into small groups allow them to generate solutions, and discuss ideas. This improves participation in subsequent class discussions, and the different responses from the various groups present many perspectives on the concepts. Learning is an evolving process, and it can be promoted by providing opportunities and creating the environments, which would allow students to interact and communicate with one another and connect various ideas/concepts. Learning is also an individual process, but discussion and contributions of the others would facilitate such individual process. Effective learning begins with planning for teaching where as a teacher I would identifying the pre-requisite knowledge, skills and experiences that the students would need to have, in relation to the concepts to be taught, and appropriate and interesting teaching/learning activities.