Amanda Webster

Teaching Philosophy

I believe that the single most important aspect of my job as an educator is to form relationships with each and every student in my classroom, building a classroom community founded on mutual respect and trust. Earning the respect and trust of my students is incredibly important because it allows students to feel safe to take risks in the classroom, which is crucial to new discoveries and learning. I build relationships by being real, authentic, and vulnerable in my interactions with students, demonstrating that it is okay to make a mistake, and modeling respect and positive social interactions. I purposefully teach the social curriculum that students need to be productive, contributing citizens in their society. I engage students in individual, personal conversations whenever possible, and truly listen to them, showing my genuine interest in who they are and what is important to them. I use the information I glean from my interactions with students, both formal and informal, to inform my instructionwhether by including examples that directly relate to students lives, or engaging students in a way that fits their style of learning. By getting to know each of my learners as individuals, and incorporating my knowledge into my instruction, I create a student-centered classroom where each child feels important and valued. I also incorporate regular grade level appropriate activities, rituals, and routines that foster community and teamwork so that students learn to trust and appreciate their classmates and the adults in the building. This creates a sense of us-ness in the classroom in the sense that the students see their class as a unit, and feel a sense of belongingness. In addition, I make sure to set clear boundaries and norms in my classroom, so students always know what to expect, and they know that my priority is to keep them safe and help them learn the most that they possibly can. I also make a connection with each students family at the very beginning of the year to open the lines of communication and collaborate on goal setting. Throughout the year, I work with families toward those goals and keep them informed of progress. By building meaningful relationships with both students and families, I create a positive learning environment where students can achieve and succeed. I also believe that students should not only be taught what they need to learn, but also how to learn. I feel there is so much power in unpacking ones own thought processes, and really analyzing the process of learning itself. By engaging students in metacognitive conversations, metacognitive responses, and subject-area activities such as questioning the author/artist, students can develop higher-level thinking and analytical skills, and begin to see the world outside of their own individual perspectives. Collaborative projects and small group work also help to foster independence, ownership of the material (and thereby, motivation), and students ability to construct their own understanding of the material. Along these lines, I also encourage students to use self-regulation as part of my classroom management system. In other words, I teach students explicit strategies for managing their own behavior (i.e., doing a self-check, rest and return, counting to 10, etc.), and help them want to behave because it allows them to do their best learning, not for a reward or to please the teacher. These techniques allow students to take control of how to behave and how to learn, rather than simply what to learn. In utilizing these strategies, I hope to foster lifelong learners and lovers of learning. Additionally, I believe that students should be engaged in learning through multiple modalities. In other words, I offer students multiple entry points into the material being studied, whether visually, aurally, or through movement. By giving students more than one way to encode and store the information, I increase their chances of remembering it and associating it with other knowledge they have attained. For example, I have had great success with including movement in my vocabulary teaching, and incorporating visual art into math patterns across varying grade levels. Along these lines, I strive to give students multiple ways of expressing understanding of a particular topic. For instance, when asking students to demonstrate their ability to create an added scene to a play we were reading, following the authors purpose, I allowed them to describe the scene in words,

Amanda Webster

Teaching Philosophy

write actual dialogue with stage directions, draw a picture of the scene, make a storyboard for the scene, or act the scene out for the class. This allowed for differentiation amongst a wide range of learners, and students could represent their scene in a way that made sense to them. This example also demonstrates Universal Design for Learning principles at work in my classroom. I always strive to foster creativity in my students and expose them to more than one way of receiving and articulating information they learn. In doing so, I hope to prepare them for the kind of divergent thinking and problem solving they will need to be able to do as a functioning member of their community in different contexts.