As a professor of education and of sociology, my teaching philosophy is based on my early career philosophy as a coach.

It is my job to give my students the tools they need to be successful. For sociology students, that means to teach them to learn how to learn and to learn how to use their cognitive abilities so they may go on after my class and continue thinking about what they learn and adding to it with their own inferences and researching. For education students, it means the same thing, but with the additional onus put on them to carry that process forward to their own future students. In that way, I am setting up a generation of teachers who will carry my teaching philosophy and the promotion of critical thinking to countless children. To accomplish this feat, I believe I could be content to have left a legacy whereby my former students can think for themselves, look beyond just what they see to find what they can discover on their own for decades to come, passing that knowledge on to countless others. To achieve my teaching philosophy, I rely on certain assumptions: 1) all of my students come to me with their own culture, background, and previous experiences; 2) my students are all important to me and it is my job to meet them where they are when they arrive at my door with the responsibility to further their education from point A to point B knowing that it will be a different learning curve for every student; and 3) my job is to help each student realize their own potential, build up their self-esteem by showing them what they can do when they think, and to show every student that I am a knowledgeable, capable, and ethical decisionmaker who will treat them all with caring and respect. Showing my students the art of metacognition is how I ensure they all have those tools to succeed in the end.