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Personal Statement of Teaching Philosophy Essay

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Personal Statement of Teaching Philosophy



I. Teaching Philosophy and Goals



I have one goal for my teaching: helping students to think and learn for themselves. This goal is as simple as it is illusive. The more experience I have as a teacher, the more I understand that there is no one-way of achieving my aim. Clearly, the proper focus of education is learning, not teaching; but I know that it is within a teacher's power-and thus it is the teacher's responsibility-to create the conditions necessary to allow students to learn. How best to create these conditions is the question. Although doing so involves performance, it is not a performing art. Although it requires the rigor and …show more content…



II. Teaching Methods and Strategies



I am hopeful that Aristotle is correct about the existence of a basic human desire for understanding, and yet I recognize that students have had a diverse mixture of experiences with learning and knowledge pursuits. Sometimes a student's educational experience has nurtured and developed that desire and begun to produce a virtuous intellectual cycle; other times, past experiences have quashed intellectual curiosity. Because students possess different learning styles and attitudes, what constitutes an inspirational challenge to one student may overwhelm or discourage another. I thus vary my teaching style regularly and use different educational methods based on a diverse set of strategies and techniques.



Some students learn from having a dialogue with their teacher and each other. For these students I prepare discussion questions, make them

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