My philosophy about teaching revolves around three basic tenants: first, the students will teach educators what to teach and how to teach it; second, teachers need to compact their curriculum to cover what students most need to succeed both in their scholarly pursuits and in life in general; and thirdly, that the art of teaching must be based on building relationships between the teacher and the students.
I learned early in my career that almost nothing which I had been taught in my teacher certification program actually applied to the realities of the typical high school classroom. Piaget just didn't really matter. My students were usually bright enough and almost universally polite and respectful. However, they weren't motivated, they lacked writing skills, and they were totally separated from the connection between what was going on in my classroom and the rest of their lives. I nearly quit after a few weeks. Now matter what I did, the students' response to my lessons were at best tepid. What I eventually realized, is that I wasn't teaching them what they wanted to know. They didn't really care about stanza structure or iambic pentameter. They could care less for metonymy or the greatness of Francis Bacon. What they wanted to know about was life--their life and life in general. They taught me that I need to show them themselves in the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer. Teaching, in the vernacular, had to be "all about them."
That's what took me to the next stage of my career: cutting to the chase. I learned from Harvey Silver, edu-guru extraordinaire, that it is okay to spend a longer amount of time on a single piece of literature. So I combined this knowledge with what my students had taught me. I stopped doing weekly vocabulary lists. I stopped using the grammar books entirely. Everything became student focused. I taught grammar through the students' own writing. I taught vocabulary only as it was found in the literature. And I didn't worry about pacing guides. I just taught what each class needed to learn most. Eventually, I developed my own sets of "rules" for writing. My students learned the "street corner rule" for identifying fragments, the "baby talk rule" for choosing pronouns correctly, and the "single subject present tense all verbs end in s except for you and I" rule for carrying out correct subject verb agreement. These rules were what the students needed--not drill and kill. This year, my students taught me that they had no idea how to do a simple research paper. So we spent the majority of the year working on how to use other people's words to back up their own ideas. Teachers must truly be dedicated to finding out not only what their students know, but also what their students don't know. And then be willing to ignore the pacing guides and teach them what they need to know.
Lastly, as my career has evolved, I have relied on game playing as a mechanism to achieve a better, more personalized, relationship with my students. I usually play games for the first week of school. It has always been amazing to me to see the effect this has had on my students. They are stunned that I am not explaining rules or firing out syllabi to be signed and returned asap. They seem surprised that I let them sit where they want to and that I know their names by the end of the week. I go to great lengths to let them know that my class will be, in a word, different. It will be different because we will laugh every day and also because we will work hard every day. But none of this can be achieved without personal relationships and those must be established early on. I once had a teacher tell me that his philosophy was to "put the yoke on early because if you don't, you'll never get it on." My philosophy is quite the opposite. In fact, because of compacting the curriculum, teaching the students what they need to know, and building personal relationships, I hope to take the yoke off rather than put it on.
