Philosophy of Education

Susan Riggleman
Education is one of the most important and complex professions that a person can choose, or be

chosen to, go into. When I was deciding where I wanted my life, my career to go, I had to ask

myself what the most important thing to me was. If the most important thing was pay, I would’ve

chosen differently. If the most important thing to me was myself, I would’ve chosen differently.

When I decided that others were more important, education became a no-brainer for me.

Students are the single most important piece of teaching, the corner pieces of a puzzle I will put

together through this paper to form the full picture of my philosophy of education.

I believe that students can learn in many ways. The most common are verbally,

kinesthetically, and visually.. We can assist them in getting better in the areas where they might

not be doing so well but it would be unfair if we only taught one way an entire school year.

Another thing that I think is key about how students learn is applicable content. This is probably

one of the most important things in math education because a lot of times it can seem like the

learning is pointless. There is no set way that students learn, and to best serve your students you

must be willing to go out of your comfort zone to meet the needs of your different groups of

students.

With the different learning styles that were previously discussed you can now investigate

two things. The first of these things is assessment. How can you test all your students the same

way if they learn in different ways? It can be incredibly difficult to give three different types of

assessment to your class to test the same material. Because of this I think that performance-based

assessment is a great way to better utilize all the students’ strengths. I believe that students

should be assessed in a fair way, and I think that grace should be given. A lot of times what gets

missed is what you're trying to learn about what your students know. A good assessment is one

that can single in on what you want to learn about your student’s knowledge.
 The second of these things is differentiation, which should be used in three different

ways. The first of these is content and this to me is probably the most difficult of the three ways

but, assume that you have half your class that is excelled and the other half that maybe is below

average. To differentiate the content, you’d offer them varying levels of difficulty in the work

they’re given. The second way that you can differentiate is by process so and I think this is what

gets missed in mathematics most often. For some things in math there's one way to do it but, for

a lot of other things there's multiple ways that you can approach a problem. By allowing your

students to have access to different ways to get the right answer, you’d be differentiating. They

would all be tested on the same material but would be turning in something different at the end. I

think differentiation will make or break students learning from you. By allowing students to

express what they like to do, they're more likely to be successful.

To best facilitate student learning I think that a classroom should be set up in a way that

is welcoming. The decorations, if you will, should reflect a teacher's personality and should also

be relevant to the subject matter. I think this is the beginning of a successful classroom, if you

make students want to be in that classroom, they're going to be more likely and willing to learn. I

tend to like group work so I think that the way that I will set up my classroom we'll have

everybody facing forward but in groups of two. By having with someone sitting next to you, you

don't feel so alone in your learning, and you also have somebody that you can ask questions to. I

think your classroom should be neat because those little things go a long way. If there's anything

in your classroom that is for the students use, I think that needs to be labeled clearly and be

readily available for the student.

Education cannot be accomplished without love, above all that is our highest calling and

perhaps the centerpiece of the puzzle of teaching.