Teaching Philosophy Page
My teaching philosophy has transformed and grown throughout the years and developed into an inquiry-based style that can be tailored to meet the diverse needs of various student populations. By using inquiry-based teaching, I can facilitate higher-order thinking skills to reinforce desired outcomes and concepts. Inquiry-based teaching and learning help students move to simplified confirmation of concepts into structured lessons that practice literary analysis skills of close reading, which require evaluating and analyzing various forms of art and literature. Once students demonstrate strengths in analyzation, my lessons can move to more guided learning activities where students work collaboratively on solutions to provided questions. As students achieve success in guided projects and discussions, they can begin to independently identify questions or issues and develop critical thinking skills that demonstrate higher-order abilities to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate the themes of the course.
During the first class, in order to tailor the inquiry-based learning environment to the needs of the students, I conduct an informal assessment of the different learning styles. For example, a survey class with several students that are kinesthetic learners would be designed with a combination of lectures and rotating small group discussions that utilize hands-on activities. The rotation of the small group discussion would provide the movement that kinesthetic learners need to stay engaged with the course material and provide an inquiry-based learning discovery activity that stores learned information into their long term schema for easier retrieval. As a result, the class is structured in a way that the desired outcomes reach all students in the room and increases their chances for later success.