Philosophy

Personal Philosophy of Teaching and Learning and

Educational Leadership

 

"Each day I would like to teach someone who will teach someone, who will . . ."

      Arreola (2010) states that all college faculty are drawn from a pool of professionals prepared to practice and/or conduct research in a specific content area. Individuals come to the professoriate with specific (professional) knowledge and skills including content expertise, practice/clinical skills, and research techniques. These skills constitute what may be called their Base Profession. I bring my prior career and expertise as well as a special core value based on a Christmas gift I received from a student over thirty years ago while teaching CCD in my local parish which has been at the core of my teaching ever since. This gift was a candle with the inscription: One day I would like to teach one child, who will teach one child. . . . Since that time I have taught children, and in some cases, their children as well as their teachers and future principals.  

     My approach to teaching includes progressivism as I tailor the learning to be directly related to the interests of the learner, and constructivism where I enable the learners to see the relationship between their ideas and knowledge.

       As I have worked with elementary school students, high school students, undergraduate, and graduate students, it is important to understand the needs, behaviors, and social environments of each of the learners. To do this, I draw on my training as an instructional designer and use Gagne’s Conditions of Learning especially nine instructional events and corresponding cognitive processes:

(1) gaining attention (reception)

(2) informing learners of the objective (expectancy)

(3) stimulating recall of prior learning (retrieval)

(4) presenting the stimulus (selective perception)

(5) providing learning guidance (semantic encoding)

(6) eliciting performance (responding)

(7) providing feedback (reinforcement)

(8) assessing performance (retrieval)

(9) enhancing retention and transfer (generalization).

 

These events should satisfy or provide the necessary conditions for learning and serve as the basis for designing instruction and selecting appropriate media (Gagne, Briggs & Wager, 1992).

       As an instructional designer, I build each of the nine instructional events into the courses that I teach which highlights my belief in progressivism. To this day, whether working with students, faculty, or staff, when they reach a level of understanding of the subject, I feel an inner sense of peace and accomplishment.  I also believe in shared leadership and use this approach when establishing educational relationships with all learners.

Philosophy and Goals of Educational Leadership

"Collaboration means working together jointly, especially in intellectual endeavors." Webster's Dictionary

     Shared leadership is the approach that I utilize in working and educational relationships.

     Everyone has leadership potential; leadership is a skill rather than simply an innate talent. --University of Maryland Libraries  

Retrieved from the World Wide Web 12/18/07 at http://www.lib.umd.edu/groups/learning/sharedleadership.html