Kathleen's Teaching Philosophy
All students deserve to learn at their level every day. This is my core central belief about education and my role as a teacher, especially as a gifted teacher. Every student deserves the opportunity to be challenged, to learn, and to grow each day, and oftentimes, my gifted students struggle in classes where their needs aren’t met appropriately. Seeing their frustration and disengagement with school, as well as other students whose needs aren’t met, fuels my drive to provide the best possible learning experiences for all students.
Good teachers teach kids, not content. I don’t mean that this means that what we teach isn’t important, but what is important is knowing how to connect our content to the students we teach. We need to understand our students, their interests, their learning styles, and their prior knowledge in order to teach them well to help them move forward. Bad teachers hide behind their content to avoid changing their methods of instruction from class to class or from year to year. I would have never thought when I first started teaching how important my relationships with my students would be to me as a veteran teacher, but now I see that my greatest successes lie not in test scores, or amazing projects, but from the trust and collaboration I’ve built between myself and students.
I strive for my students to create work that is real-world, authentic, and meaningful to them. As a teacher, my most successful moments come from what I call my 10/90 split. Ten percent of what I teach is direct instruction; the other 90 percent comes from the student’s creative and problem solving abilities to create work that reflects them and their interests. For example, I teach strategy game design. I give them all of the game design materials as a packet at the start. There are no quizzes or tests, and no wrong answers. In fact, when designing games, students create their own problems in terms of setting forth the type of games they want to create, then they must design, prototype, test, and repeat their work until they achieve their goals. Along the way, I am a consultant and I empower them to make their own decisions, even when I disagree with them. This way, students create their own meaningful work over which they have complete ownership, and they can effectively communicate and reflect on the development process they undertook. When students share their work with the larger game design community, they are taken seriously as game designers because their work holds up against other game designers. They have become creators of content, not just consumers, and have put their own ideas out into the world. If they can do this in 7th grade, think how encouraging this is for the rest of their lives!
By building relationships with students, by being attuned to their educational needs, and empowering them to create real-world, authentic products that empower them to pursue their own goals and ideas, I feel good about what I do. I went into the teaching profession to make a difference in the lives of my students, and all of my efforts are to continue developing the knowledge, skills, and new areas of research and innovation in education so that I may continue to serve my students well.
Good teachers teach kids, not content. I don’t mean that this means that what we teach isn’t important, but what is important is knowing how to connect our content to the students we teach. We need to understand our students, their interests, their learning styles, and their prior knowledge in order to teach them well to help them move forward. Bad teachers hide behind their content to avoid changing their methods of instruction from class to class or from year to year. I would have never thought when I first started teaching how important my relationships with my students would be to me as a veteran teacher, but now I see that my greatest successes lie not in test scores, or amazing projects, but from the trust and collaboration I’ve built between myself and students.
I strive for my students to create work that is real-world, authentic, and meaningful to them. As a teacher, my most successful moments come from what I call my 10/90 split. Ten percent of what I teach is direct instruction; the other 90 percent comes from the student’s creative and problem solving abilities to create work that reflects them and their interests. For example, I teach strategy game design. I give them all of the game design materials as a packet at the start. There are no quizzes or tests, and no wrong answers. In fact, when designing games, students create their own problems in terms of setting forth the type of games they want to create, then they must design, prototype, test, and repeat their work until they achieve their goals. Along the way, I am a consultant and I empower them to make their own decisions, even when I disagree with them. This way, students create their own meaningful work over which they have complete ownership, and they can effectively communicate and reflect on the development process they undertook. When students share their work with the larger game design community, they are taken seriously as game designers because their work holds up against other game designers. They have become creators of content, not just consumers, and have put their own ideas out into the world. If they can do this in 7th grade, think how encouraging this is for the rest of their lives!
By building relationships with students, by being attuned to their educational needs, and empowering them to create real-world, authentic products that empower them to pursue their own goals and ideas, I feel good about what I do. I went into the teaching profession to make a difference in the lives of my students, and all of my efforts are to continue developing the knowledge, skills, and new areas of research and innovation in education so that I may continue to serve my students well.
