Teaching Philosophy
The role of a teacher is often defined as a person who inspires, motivates, encourages and imparts knowledge to learners. In order to this successfully, I believe it is imperative that a teacher creates an atmosphere where students can feel comfortable expressing their thoughts and ideas, this is particularly important as an art teacher. In order to create a space where students feel comfortable, I feel it is important to focus on yourself and your approach to students as a teacher.
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My main goal as a teacher is to generate passion for art within my students, while enabling them to be as creative and expressive as possible. In doing so, I hope to help them learn and retain the taught practical artistic skills, while also enhancing their critical thinking and reflective skills. Something which will not only help them across other subjects, but also within their future careers. Within the classroom, I strive to create a community of practice, a safe space where student can share and explore ideas together. In my experience, this can be done by simply being kind and warm towards your students, and importantly showing them that you value their opinions and ideas equally. I personally think, respect is the foundation in building a teacher-student relationship. Yet respect is earned, it cannot be demanded. I believe you must respect the students for them to respect you.
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Teachers must develop teaching, learning and assessment strategies, both formative and summative, that support differentiated learning in a way that respects the dignity of all young learners. I believe peer and self-reflection to be an important element when implementing formative feedback in the classroom as it was an important mode to help students develop their work. Discussions, worksheets and annotations within students visual sketchpad are just some ways within each lesson to enhance students ability to reflect deeply about their work. In order to scaffold reflective practice, David Perkins Ladder of feedback was used to help encourage the constructive process of critique. The ladder of feedback is broken up into 4 steps which requires students to ask questions of the work they are reviewing before commenting areas they feel are of value and of concern. In doing so, students should then be able to make an informed suggestions for themselves and their peers in order to help them improve. When speaking to students, I asked then they taught helped them the most to critically think about their own work. Interestingly, students identified that peer sharing and them giving each other ideas was the most beneficial due to the honesty and openness they can have with one another. This demonstrates how important it is to have an open dialogue with students.
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I personally believe that keeping a reflective journal on thoughts that arise from academic journals or reflecting on your teaching practice and approaches is an invaluable way to improve my teaching practice. I think as teachers we must always acknowledge that we can learn more and do better. Through reflective practice, it is one way to work towards that. Jim Gleeson (2014) points out that teachers early years in the profession are characterized by an idealistic enthusiasm that typically lasts about 7 years. I think art in particular has the opportunity to maintain a level of enthusiasm as there is an endless supply of themes that can be explored through various mediums, we just have to think and explore. For me personally, an enthusiasm for art has been instilled in me since I was teenager, a personal goal of mine will be to retain that enthusiasm throughout my career. This will be aided by continuous reflection and professional development courses.
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Gleeson, J.(2014) What sort of teacher do I want to be -critical and creatively constructive or compliant, conformist, and conservative? In Pathways to Innovation and Development in Education A Collection of Invited Essays(ed. Rose Dolan)
