Written June 2011

Portfolio Writing:

Connecting Philosophy to Practice

Write a paper in which you link your philosophy of education papers in 1a to the development and implementation of the units in the appendix. Make direct references to specific aspects of your unit plans to make it easy for the reader to understand connections.

In my philosophy of education, I note that to create a healthy classroom community, a successful educator much recognize that her students usually differ from her in many critical ways; their profiles of strengths or weaknesses, cultural backgrounds, notions of gender roles, and history of school experiences are just a few of the possibilities. Whenever I get an idea for a unit, then, I consider the various students in my class and make modifications to the theme, content, activities, and other variables accordingly to appeal to my students. For example, in teaching my House on Mango Street unit, I choose a book that could appeal to a broad swath of my class population, the majority of whom are first-generation American immigrants, just like the author and the book’s protagonist. Also, by emphasizing the theme of the American Dream, the way in which it differs from individual to individual, and generation to generation, and the issues of equality that it raises, I drew on a theme that many students experience in their everyday lives.

In my philosophy, I note my believe that students often pay rapt attention during experiential classroom activities with real-life implications, such as when participating in mock-trials or translating Shakespeare into modern vernacular. I believe that such experiential lessons appeal to students because they build directly on what students need to know for success in their environment, in life. As a result, these lessons are also better remembered and used later in life. In my “Uniquely Alaskan Lesson” I used hypothermia as a “hook”, drawing students into the dark Alaskan tale of “To Build a Fire” and teaching them the message of the Naturalist literary movement, and an important lesson for their survival in Alaska; nature overpowers man. By having students go outside and experience the cold and then write about it descriptively using the five senses, I am giving them the opportunity to write about something that they have lived, rather than just writing about experiences in books.

This ties into another one of my ideals; I do not think of writing and reading as the sole language arts. I want my students to understand the English language not simply as letters on a page, but as the way we communicate, written and read, spoken and listened. To this end, I hope to engage my students in listening to and creating oral storytelling projects. In the “Podcasting Lessons” I created for Jason Ohler’s class, I detailed six lesson plans that involve podcasting. In one lesson plan that I actually taught this year, students created a satirical podcast about their pet peeves in the course of learning about Huck Finn and vehicles of satire. My favorite  lesson detailed in “Podcasting Lessons” (developed from the culminating project for my earlier “Moral Ambiguity” unit) involves asking students to go out into the community and interview an elder about their experiences growing up. I like this project because it not only involves students in the process of producing and editing a podcast; it helps them to connect to adults in their community and gives them perspective on the past and their value as a teen as a transmitter of history. Teens are at a stage of development in which they are trying to figure out who they are; I hope that projects like these will give them perspective on their own values and let them know that they can play an important role in society. With a similar goal, the anticipatory set from Lesson 1 of the  “Moral Ambiguity: Good and Evil” unit prepares students to empathize the crotchety old “Eddie” the hero of the Five People You Meet in Heaven. It starts with a Read Aloud of “The Sneetches”, then a stand-up-sit-down activity, and then asks students to reflect on negative stereotypes held by teens about the elderly and the elderly about teens.

These exercises get at the heart of my ultimate teaching goal; to help my students develop the language and social skills necessary to connect with and relate to whomever they wish to in the community, to put on whatever shoes they would like and be able to skip around in them comfortably.

Finally, in my English classes, I not only want to teach my students to be more effective writers and more passionate readers, I also want them to learn to be more imaginative, about their own lives and the lives of those around them. In my “House on Mango Street” curriculum, the primary skills focus is in helping students to understand, interpret and value figurative language, including similes and metaphors. Their knowledge culminates in the production of acrostic name poems, in which students describe the meaning of their name using the five senses and figurative language.

I thought this project was one of the most successful of those that I assigned this year. Students enjoy expressing themselves, and I enjoy those assignments most that teach me something new about my students. I firmly believe that if I can communicate to my students this personal investment in them, they will want to learn from me.

As an earnest new teacher committed to improving my craft, my philosophy will change, and my unit plans will as well; someday, on a time scale of years, however, I hope to attain “master teacher” status, where I can approach that asymptote of perfection in which my unit plans and my philosophy of teaching almost perfectly align.