Teaching Memoir

My Teaching Philosophy

    How one teaches is undoubtedly influenced by one’s personal theory of learning. I have come to embrace Bruner’s constructivist and discovery learning theory as the core of my teaching philosophy. Upon entry, we are all on the verge of exploring, comparing, and relating everything unfamiliar to our lived experiences. Sometimes, we even reframe those experiences against the backdrop of others’ perspectives. My goal is to promote learning through inquiry and interaction, guided by learners’ backgrounds, relevant experiences, and situated contexts. This means that as an instructor, I cannot merely transmit knowledge to students through lectures and textbooks but should act as a facilitator, creating opportunities for students to interact with materials in meaningful ways and supporting them to reflect upon the meanings they have constructed in various social contexts. I should encourage students to discover principles by themselves. My task is to translate information to be learned into a format appropriate to the learner's current state of understanding, organizing the curriculum in a spiral manner so that the student continually builds upon what they have already learned.​

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• Comprehensible input:

  • Instruction must be structured so that it can be easily grasped by the learner. This means that knowledge should be illustrated in a simple enough form that is recognizable to the students’ experience. Providing a diversity of meaningful, realistic, challenging, and structured language input is critically important. Teaching aims should be achieved little by little. Sufficient comprehensible input, as a critical ingredient in language acquisition, should take time. So, I develop the gradual improvement principle. Take teaching literacy as an example. I would let students do fast reading to get a general idea, detailed reading to get needed information, speaking to consolidate learning products, and writing to check the mastery of language points step by step. Through this, students become aware of what patterns can be expected to appear in the input by building upon existing knowledge and elaborating to the level of full understanding and mastery, thus facilitating interest in learning overall.

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• Culturally relevant teaching:

  • While relying upon the experiences, backgrounds, and needs of learners to create a space in the classroom where their voices are heard and honored, ideas are shared, and knowledge construction is a process embraced by all, I believe students have different goals and different learning styles, be it visual, auditory, and tactile-kinesthetic learners because they come from diverse cultural and linguistic repertoires. This brings to light the importance, necessity even, of learning languages. I insist that “language is culture in motion”, and this inspires me to adapt culturally responsive teaching pedagogy into classrooms. To make it more specific, it means to have selective acculturation involving family backgrounds and to value and utilize the connection between language and identity for achieving bilingual confidence. I would make an attempt to discover and exploit learners’ pre-existing knowledge from the outset by surveying my students’ linguistic and personal experiences. Then incorporate culturally relevant activities and texts that make learners feel valued and empowered. I will pay attention to connecting home and school literacies through the use of authentic material and texts that the students encounter in their surrounding communities. The integration of transnational literacies (the written language practices of people who are involved in activities that span national boundaries) into the curriculum can help me better understand my students and engage them more in literacy and learning. All above, learners’ cognitive structure (i.e., schema, mental models, intuitive and analytical thinking) will be, to the largest extent, activated, and this would allow them to go beyond the information given. 

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• Shifting teachers' role to scaffolding, modeling, coaching of learners:

  • A teacher is critically important in managing classroom interactions. Interactions bring to life each individual’s experiences that he or she particularly owns. Interactions can be guided, stimulated, or modeled by a teacher. The role of the teacher is to encourage learning both at the fact-oriented level (e.g., what is the relationship between them? What is empathy?) and at a deeper level in which higher-order thinking is required (e.g., problem-solving, reasoning). These two types of knowledge are equally important to me as building blocks for students to reach beyond their "i+1" stage. Students should be able to complete a task beyond their previous performance. For me, making progress in reaching higher scales of performance is what I see as academic success rather than a sheer understanding of learning contents. Within these confines, my goal is geared towards providing appropriate scaffolding as needed, which leads to learners’ eventual independence.

  • Specifically, under the guidance of the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP), I would use strategies including multiple visual aids, gestures, manipulatives, and repeating targeted academic vocabulary often to provide a contextual framework that makes the content clear and distinctive. Simultaneously, this approach develops their language proficiency by applying knowledge to real-life situations. Since I believe knowledge is constructed and not merely absorbed, I would incorporate opportunities for active learning into my lesson plans. For example, I would require students to consider real-life experiences through the lens of a particular theory, ask students to look through brochures, websites, bulletin boards, self-help or parenting manuals in their communities in light of comparing what they learn with what they see. They would then report their discoveries and thoughts in classroom discussions and seek solutions together to better serve their communities. I would have students deal with scenarios by adopting an assigned perspective or theoretical stance when examining issues. It is highly important to challenge students to think critically from different angles and guide them in constructing opinions. 

  • On the other hand, classroom discrepancy is also an element that I consider when scaffolding and modeling. I would help struggling students to read and master as much as successful readers in the classroom by selecting appropriately-leveled text. Sometimes, for eliciting the culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students’ prior knowledge, I would adopt trans-language practices to support learning and reduce the affective filter. It is also my goal to create a comfortable learning environment in which student-centered classrooms could be achieved to the fullest.

  • Setting high but attainable expectations: I feel motivated when my teacher says to me, “You can definitely do great!” Expectations effectively promote learning when learners are working within their Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). Increasing attainable expectations to ensure improvement is what I should engage parents and caregivers to work on together. I also hope to meet whatever goals or expectations learners may bring to the class. In order to achieve this, I would try to build connections between school and families, incorporate family projects to involve parents and community literacy.

  • In teaching, I would constantly ask myself: “How will they react to the relevant topics, what questions might they have?" I would see what are the prerequisites for them to understand and make sure they get prepared before class so I can help them find answers by themselves. And if new questions arise, could other students help to answer as a way of sharing and discussion? How can I build on that further to facilitate higher order thinking? What else can my students creatively achieve by drawing from their knowledge base? What previous learning contents can I relate to and how to inspire the circulation of knowledge in their minds? What challenges will they confront at present? As a teacher, I should never lose heart when students are struggling. I believe schools and families should pay more attention to all concomitant factors and, as I mentioned above, focus mainly on making progress in grasping higher scales of performance.

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• ​Reflection promotes action: As a teacher, I would make space in my pedagogy for students to frequently reflect upon what they’ve learned. Reflection provides opportunities to synthesize and integrate knowledge. They will be better able to apply their newly conceived knowledge across academic assignments, discourses, and, of course, social contexts. I hope my students leave my class with a "toolbox" that they can take everywhere and use for various tasks they encounter in university, in the workplace, or in life. Through regular self-reflections, they keep building up their knowledge base and apply it effectively. Besides, I would reflect upon teaching evaluations regularly because students’ responses are crucial characteristics of comprehensible input。 By doing so, I could modify and refresh my teaching methods to better satisfy students’ needs. During office hours or after class, I have plentiful opportunities to give students constructive suggestions, comments, and encouragement, and I would highly value that. In return, reflections grant me access to know my students in all-encompassing aspects.

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• Embedding the power of technology: Developing computer software to support language learning, namely computer-assisted language learning (CALL), allows learners to improve and polish their language skills more efficiently. Each learner may have different weaknesses when learning a language, while CALL is capable of conducting more personalized testing for each learner and giving each individual opportunities to be exposed to different learning materials. CALL may also encourage learners to study language actively. A typical example is Duolingo, which allows users to take language courses and incentivizes them by granting “experience points.” As technology evolves, an ideal teaching situation in which the teacher is absent (i.e., Teacher-Absent Language Learning, TALL) may be achieved, as learners can directly interact with a computer system, and the system can automatically evaluate and adapt to user language levels based on Big Data. I could incorporate this into my curriculum to better assist my students after school.

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    In conclusion, I have outlined a general notion for the future of my teaching. I have strived to build up my teaching approach with strong theoretical support and detailed practices to fully demonstrate my ideal teaching design. Teaching is a commitment to continuous pedagogical growth, and I will continue refining my philosophy of teaching and its implementation through professional, peer, and student evaluations. I believe that the ultimate goal of education is to empower students to always be able to do something beyond their previous capabilities—to keep learning, growing, and adapting throughout their lives..

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