My Educational Philosophy

As a teacher, I believe that the classroom should be a place of constant collaboration,

welcome to an exchange of varied thoughts and ideas as the teacher serves purely as a guide to
the goal of greater understanding of the world around us. I believe in Singers philosophy on
social studies teaching that debates, dialogues and dissections of current issues within the
classroom are essential to providing a multicultural, inclusive social studies education. In
addition, I agree with Singers belief that engaging students through debate of current issues
through the lens of past events allows for the past to truly engage the present and provides
students with the opportunity to understand historical trends.
The social studies classroom should be a collaborative ideas market based on intellectual
reciprocity as we strive to serve our students in two meaningful ways. Firstly, we engage and
empower our students by making the past part of their present, and secondly, in accordance with
Vygotsky, we scaffold students learning by building bridges between their individuality and the
subject matter, therefore allowing for true social examination. By doing this, we allow for
students to flourish as engaged learners and maximize their potential within their individual
zones of proximal development. In teaching this way, a students question of How does this
matter to me? should always be able to be answered honestly and thoroughly as the social
studies education being provided is one that molds students into critical thinkers and globally
engaged citizens. To loosely quote Singer, an effective social studies education should be one in
which students learn to become critical observers of the world around them; and in my mind, the
classroom should serve as a haven for intellectual curiosity, dissention, and social critique.
I believe in Gardners theory that students possess multiple intelligences, and what may
serve one student well may not fully demonstrate another students capabilities. That is why it is

the teachers duty to provided differentiated, individualized learning to best serve each student, a
lofty ideal that can be accomplish through providing multimodal formative activities and
assessments that allow students to show their strengths and improve upon their weaknesses. For
example, if one unit assessment is a multiple-choice test, the next should be in the form on essay,
the next a group project. This kind of differentiated assessment serves to cater to all learning
styles and should be applied to formative assessments as well. Furthermore, I consider Piagets
assertions in regards to adolescence to be quite valid as the period of adolescent development is
the most formative and often most difficult part of growing up and as educators, we need to be
sensitive to that. To that end, we as teachers need to be cognizant of our students as individuals,
and be willing to listen and cater to their needs within the classroom. How a student interacts
with his or her environment during this period of development is critical to that students future,
so we need to support that student as best we can, an example being using personal surveys at the
beginning of the year to assess individual student interests and then checking up with students
throughout the year just to see how theyre doing. Im a firm believer in showing students that
you truly care about them through your actions, as sometimes, students just need to know
someone cares about them as they go through this tumultuous process of becoming an adult.