Hope Winburn

January 29, 2015

Final Portfolio
Personal Philosophy of Literacy Teaching and Learning
Guiding principles for my conception of teaching and learning include building
relationships with students, being reflective and adaptable, and setting my students up for
success inside and outside of my classroom. I anchor my pedagogy in these principles
because literacy learning can only occur once the foundations of social emotional
learning and collaboration are in place. In order to understand the type of literacy learner
that a student is, I must first know what kind of person that student is. Building
relationships with students is at the center of any kind of teaching. Students have to know
that I care about their learning and growth in order for them to feel motivated to fully
engage in the curriculum. Once a classroom community is established, classroom
management, content learning, and collaboration fall into place. My teaching will be
centered on teacher-student as well as student-student collaboration during
reading/writing workshops.
Relationships are necessary for collaboration to occur because a welcoming
classroom culture encourages respect and safety for all students. In turn, collaboration
fosters student voice, exposure to a variety of perspectives, and the development of a
learner into a co-teacher. All students have specific strengths and I want students to use
each other as resources during group and whole class tasks. Relationships, collaboration,
and personally relevant material combine to create a strong classroom community in
which students support each other and can grow academically as well as socially. Student
motivation is the driving force behind all learning, and focusing on social emotional

learning will help me foster motivation through a culture of respect, accountability, and
support.
My second guiding principle is that as a teacher, I need to be both reflective and
adaptable. I strongly believe in using ongoing formative assessment to inform instruction
that will meet specific student needs. I will need to continually reflect on my teaching
practices to determine what is working and what changes need to be made. Using
incoming data will allow me to adapt my instruction so that I can differentiate based on
common student strengths and areas for improvement. Whenever possible, I can
individualize instruction through scaffolds so that I am attending to each childs zone of
proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978). I want to continue to be a student of reading
education so that I am keeping up with the most recent research and the best-supported
instructional practices that can positively impact my students. The best teachers are
perpetual learners, which I aspire to be.
Finally, it is my responsibility to prepare my students for success both in and out
of the classroom. I will need to make my purposes or rationales for instruction clear and
visible to students so that they know everything I have them do is for their own benefit.
When I give students assignments, I must model how to complete them, so that I am
showing them what to do rather than just telling them what to do. While I will provide
students with choice in their reading and writing tasks, I also need to expose them to
multiple genres and authors so that they are more prepared for the reading and writing
that will be asked of them in the work place. I would be doing a disservice to my
students, if I did not provide them access to Delpits (1990) genres of power through
knowledge of academic language and formal writing conventions. Students will practice

these discourses first in my classroom so that they will be fluent in them after they leave
my classroom (Gee, 2003). My goals for students are for them to think critically about
what we read, engage with the material, and have something to say about what we read.
If students care about what we read, they will be motivated, and other literacy tasks such
as making arguments and participating in classroom discussions, will follow.
My teaching practices (collaboration, formative assessment, differentiation,
scaffolding, modeling, student choice, and exposure to all kinds of text) are driven by a
belief in teacher-student relationships as the foundation for all learning. Being adaptable
and preparing students for success both stem from putting social emotional learning at the
forefront of the classroom. I teach by these principles because of my conviction that
students will only care about literacy once they know I care about them. I want to share
my enthusiasm for reading and writing my students so that students leave my classroom
as critical thinkers, close readers, and expressive writers. I am a teacher of readers, not of
reading, meaning that the student comes before the task. I will strive to always consider
the students needs first, and let the most appropriate literacy instruction follow to create
growth and self-belief in all learners.