Nicholas Hevrin

EDU 202-1002
4/10/19
Educational Philosophy

Teaching is a profession that is a major part of my immediate family. My mother was a teacher

all my life, my sister is finishing school for teaching and everyone in my family has coached at some

point in their life including myself. I have always been interested in teaching but never considered it a

career option for me until I worked a tutoring job last year. While tutoring students in math, I was

exposed to the joys of teaching such as seeing your students succeed and get better at what they are

learning after struggling for a while. I enjoyed the interaction of teacher to student building that trust

and learning the best ways to help each student. Through my tutoring position the last year I have

learned about different teaching strategies and the importance of how each student is different and

learns through different methods. While my class size for tutoring ranges from one to six students I was

able to see the how a larger classroom runs during my observation. While in the smaller groups

everyone is sitting close by, so it is easy to ensure everyone is on task and easily help those in need of

help. The larger classes are where a teacher moves throughout the classroom. I noticed in my

observations that the teachers were rarely stagnant and if they were you’d see more students drift off

into their own thoughts. The teaching environment is an active one that needs attention to be nurtured

so learning can happen.

As a teacher I feel that I am most connected with the educational philosophy of progressivism.

As a kinetic learner I understand the value of a learning while doing and feel it should be a major part of

the classroom. When students can feel and manipulate the lesson it will be easier to learn and put to

memory as they have a real-life experience and an enjoyable memory to attribute to the lesson. As a
kinetic learner the easiest classes for me were the science courses since all lessons were connected to

labs allowing me to see the lesson in action. I do understand that some students can’t learn this way so

other ways need to be implemented. My psychological orientation for teaching is constructivism.

Students can not have the lessons downloaded into their brains and attempting to simply lecture

students will lead to them quickly forgetting the lesson after they have been tested on the subjects

taught. Students must construct the lesson in their brains themselves helping them understand it in

their own terms rather than simply what they read from a PowerPoint.

Instruction is tied with my educational philosophy and dictates what strategies I will use to

teach my students. My philosophy requires experiences and that is how I will teach my classes. We will

learn through activities and experiments allowing the students to manipulate lessons for their own. This

will of course require a fair amount of planning and supervision on my part, but I feel it will be the most

effective way of instruction. I plan to be a very approachable teacher in the classroom. I want students

to feel comfortable in my classroom, so they won’t be afraid to ask questions about lessons and grades

for my class. All students are different, so it will be important to allow for other ways to learn such as

accompanying PowerPoints for lessons or information packets for the students. Assessment will be

mostly based on performance in the classroom as I feel there are many teachers that simply teach for a

test. While I will still have assessments, my assessment will be on the PowerPoint but will also be about

explaining what we learned during the activities.

I believe that one quality I will need to work on for teaching is learning how to lesson plan more

accurately. For my tutoring job my lessons are scripted so lesson plan writing is not an important aspect

to the job. Progressive teachers need to have things planned out well in advance to help keep lessons

moving forwards to avoid the class from getting stagnant and repetitive for them selves and the

students as well. I will also need even more patience than I currently have. I am an exceptionally patient
person which I have learned through teaching elementary students, but more patience is always more

beneficial to teaching.