MY PERSONAL TEACHING PHILOSOPHY 1

My Personal Teaching Philosophy

Avery Sweet

Spring 2023

Exploration of Teaching and Learning in Diverse K-12 Settings

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My teaching philosophy would most closely be associated with social reconstructionism

with a necessary intermixing of existentialism. Through a multitude of teaching settings

including attending Chico State, I have reached two illuminating conclusions. The first is that

learning and understanding are vastly different, and they are confused at the peril of the student’s

success. The second conclusion is that this critical difference is especially poignant in teaching

history. This realization leads me to gravitate towards social reconstructionism, an imperative:

“Teachers guide students to think critically about social injustice and challenge oppression”

(Koch, 2020). My best history teachers all employed a strategy that I plan to emulate. Assuming

students will learn history in the traditional sense very often proves fruitless and

counterproductive. Instead, what I have seen work like a pinch of magic time after time is

attempting to bring students to a deeper understanding of history, its contours, patterns, and

themes instead of relying on ineffectual memorization and surface-level analysis. It would be my

hope that my students would come away understanding the challenging questions posed by

history and what these concepts mean to them and how they wish to shape the world they find

themselves in.

This hope also requires immense personal agency which bears the need for

existentialism: “Teachers support students in exploring their own interests” (Koch, 2020).

Ultimately, students leave the classroom, and they must embody personal agency to pursue

subjects that interest them. It is critical to enable this drive and for the students to receive the

understanding necessary to pursue future discoveries: “Every student deserves a safe,

welcoming, affirming learning environment” (National Education Association, 2023). Students

must be met on their terms and must receive what they need to have a fulfilling education,

especially in an area as critical as understanding the human story and their place in it.
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What children learn is as paramount as how they learn. It is not enough to reinforce stale

narratives and insist on students parroting answers. It would by my hope to bolster and nurture

my students’ critical thinking skills and ability to learn long after I am a faded memory. It would

be my goal and pleasure to know that my students know why events happened above all else.

With the ability to think critically regarding sources of information, larger social constructions,

cause and effect dynamics, the differences between physical evidence and narratives, and how

histories are written, my students will be able to tackle new knowledge long after I am no longer

there to help. The resounding positives of visual learning and discussion-based lessons have been

repeatedly demonstrated to me. It should not fall to the teacher to pack information into students

like a folder but to guide them to knowledge so that the process can be forever replicated.

Finding a reliable metric for measuring student success is no small task and demands

acceptance of the reality that all students are different and learn differently. I would hope to

assess students on a more comprehensive basis that included writing skills, discussion-based

learning, and when necessary comprehensive testing (California State University, Chico, 2023). I

believe qualitative assessments that provide a comprehensive, practical, and diverse application

of students’ knowledge and students’ articulation of that knowledge most important. Though

solid assessments are critical for measuring student development, I also strongly believe in

employing more intangible abstract assessments based on students’ ability to work together to

find solutions and to form and to evaluate their beliefs through discussion-based collaborative

learning.

It is my hope that I can apply what I have learned to help students come to a fuller

understanding of the world. In my experience as a student, often classmates were discouraged by

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the subject of history and how it was taught. I hope to help students appreciate history as a

subject but also to give them more appreciation for their place in it.
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References

California State University, Chico. (2023). Developing student learning outcomes.

https://www.csuchico.edu/assessment/assessment-planning-definitions/outcomes.shtml

Koch, J., (2020). Teach: Introduction to education (4th ed.). Sage.

National Education Association. (2023). Great public schools.

https://www.nea.org/great-public-schools