Philosophy of Teaching Statement – August 2020
By Ken Massalski
Too often have I observed teachers become lost in the same, repeated routine of lecturing. They have fallen asleep at the wheel and have been blindly guiding the students they have been driving with no sense of direction or purpose. Students today often struggle to find purpose in education because their educators do not let students experience purposeful activities. Experiencing this firsthand, my focus and philosophy as a teacher is to go above and beyond the accepted standards of teaching seen today by educating students in a way that helps them find significance in their learning.
I believe that bridging abstract concepts with concrete activities – or in other words, applying learned material, is the greatest way to establish value of said learned material in a learner. Being able to immediately put into practice what I have learned as a student has been some of the most exciting and rewarding educational experiences in my life. From studying music theory to then creating music, from learning digital circuitry to designing and building a functional voltage reader, and from learning to teach ESL to actually teaching ESL students in practicum, have all been definite moments of growth in my life that continues to leave an impact on me today. Having experienced this, I make it my focus to create lessons that revolve around application or practicality.
The international students I taught in the reading lab for my TESL practicum saw significant improvements in their reading. For instance, I spent several lessons teaching students about extracting key ideas in paragraphs of unfamiliar topics. I did not teach them with improving their ESL reading grade in mind. Instead, I told the students that information extraction is important for the academic readings they will be doing in the future in order to understand difficult concepts, and that mastering this skill will make them better English readers in general. After I said that, the students seemed to spark an interest and became motivated to learn and participate in exercises. To my pleasant surprise, by the second lesson regarding extraction of key information, the students were completing exercises correctly and were finishing them much faster than I had expected. No doubt, they had become better readers. Reflecting on this, I am confident the students’ reading grades have improved, even though grade improvement was not my focus. I was and still am glad to have shown the value of the practical uses of school material to the students.
As far as it is in my power to design my classes, my goal is to always critically assess each lesson plan to determine what is practical and what is impractical, what is necessary and unnecessary, to best empower my students. I desire to inspire students and to equip them with the tools necessary to become more knowledgeable, smarter, and better versions of themselves. And by exposing students to an application-focused method of teaching, I believe I can achieve that desire.