Week 5 Element Spotlight: PHILOSOPHY
“What’s your instructional philosophy?”
That’s not a question that teachers hear every day. Upon hearing it, you may even LOL a little bit, thinking that you don’t have an instructional philosophy.
Before images of old white men with long beards carrying humorously large leather-bound books in their arms start flooding your mind, consider for a moment that you too are a philosopher. Not in this traditional, classical sense (think: Aristotle, Socrates, etc.), but in the sense that you have beliefs and ideologies that serve as guiding principles for you to make decisions about your classroom and how you teach.
We all have an answer to the question, “How do students learn best?”
Whether or not we’ve ever articulated our answer to this, it’s always operating inside of our minds. It leads us to lean in a bit more with wide eyes and nodding head during the conference session that seems like the missing piece we’ve been waiting for. It leads us to roll our eyes comically when our principal rolls out a different school-wide instructional initiative that we just know won’t work. It leads us to plan our lessons, interact with our students, prioritize certain things over others, and color (if not outright shape) every aspect of our classrooms.
There is a lot of power in having a clear instructional philosophy. But you can’t harness that power until you own what your philosophy is and consciously let it guide your decisions. That’s the core of the Live your PHILOSOPHY element.
To start Week 5, think really hard about your answer to that question. “How do students learn best?” Write it down. Speak it. Share it. You’ll likely find that you don’t actually have to think that hard about it because, there it is, hiding just below the surface of your thoughts, waiting for you to speak it into existence.
