Brittany Wilson

Teaching Philosophy

Integration is the primary philosophy I use to portray meaning and purpose to my instruction. I use

integration of concepts to coordinate plans and assignments, integrating the outside world, bringing

current events to them, and having them apply the concepts we are learning to themselves. The way to

integrate is to mesh concepts of the unit together, creating relationships between the concepts of the unit.

This is especially effective if the concepts are not typically joined in teaching.

For instance, in a lesson plan teaching elements of the plot diagram and the elements of a strong

introductory paragraph in one class, I have taught the commonalities of the two as both being a "preview"

of a work, where the introductory paragraph poses as the movie trailer preview of what students will be

talking about in their essays, yet still leaving them with a cliff hanger because they are not giving all the

information up front until the reader gets to the body of the essay. The plot diagram acts as a preview

also by outlining the key elements and summarizing what happens in the story, without actually giving

any detail. I have students work with both of these concepts while they creatively write a short story on

a celebrity learning a lesson. This assignment integrates plot diagram, introduction writing, creative

writing, thematic writing based upon the unit's theme, and the outside world's popular culture. This one

assignment helps the student work on many skills, making more connections in the classroom, granting

more purpose to my teaching and their learning.

Integrating the outside world, bringing current events to them, and have them apply the concepts we're

learning to themselves is how an outstanding educator strengthens purpose for learning.

An outstanding educator designs the assessment first, envisioning what expectations she wants students

to strive to achieve. Thereafter, the educator drives her plans to get students to perform successfully on

said assessment. By doing this, I will never be the teacher to set students up for failure by asking for

more than I have provided them, or fails to teach what is asked of them on the assessment. I won't leave

my students in the dark and I won't assume they have knowledge past what I have provided them. By

designed backwards, an outstanding educator outlines the unit for themselves simply creating the

assessment first, preparing students for all concepts and skills needed to achieve and providing organized

structure always leading to purpose.

An outstanding educator provides multiple layers of instruction: new material and text, personal

assessment and application of that assessment for students' futures. Providing these layers in instruction

is asking students for more than just reading and writing English, but by living and "doing" English

concepts. Experiencing concepts provides different lenses or perspectives for students so that they may

live other approaches than just their own; for instance, asking students to provide reader response to

material as the character or author. These different perspectives will gauge and focus their own opinions

while providing knowledge of world cultures and tolerance of deviation from themselves.

An outstanding educator establishes an environment where students live a lesson that they may be fueled

by excitement and the unexpected, yet prepared for the purposeful assessment to come. The outstanding

educator always provides purposeful lessons and assessments, while actively engaging and keeping

students' ideas alive and heard in class, even after they have submitted to the drop box.

For my philosophy, teaching is a student-teacher relationship opening students' vision to find meaning in

relation to who they are establishing themselves to be. I do this by integrating my modern materials,

relating texts by thematic approaches, discussing the realities of the outside world, modeling listening

and acceptance of their ideas, and teaching them to apply different perspective to help both their writing

and reading so that they may aspire to more than lower level learning but to application, critique, and

find how this new found knowledge allows them to learn more about themselves rather than fear wrong

answers and teacher domination. An outstanding educator will teach so that students will learn

acceptance, encouragement, self-expression and self-assessment by way of unit designing, expressive

and comforting classroom culture, and integrated ideas and materials.