In the future, after obtaining a degree from Wheaton College, I would like to work either at an international school overseas, focusing on high school students or stay in the Chicago area teaching incoming international students in a higher education institution. Even though the setting may vary depending on future opportunities, there are shared common characteristics within my target audience.
Inspiring
The foundation of my teaching philosophy is that I want my content to be inspiring. When students arrive in my class, I want them to be inspired and to welcome the challenge. I want my content to be something people will see from a Pinterest board. When people go on Pinterest, they are very vague about what they are looking for, no matter it is about wedding planning or clothes shopping. But after seeing all these inspirations, they can distinguish what they like and what they don’t like. More importantly, people will come up with better ideas of what they want and accomplish it. That’s what I was looking for in my classroom.
Amusing
Being under the Chinese education system for almost my entire life, it came with great responsibility and burden. However, I don’t want my students to go through such a heavy load of study with their language learning. Instead, I want to create a less stressful environment by making the content amusing. There’s nothing wrong with learning in a fun and relaxing environment.
Educating
This is another core idea of my teaching philosophy. My role model once told me, the final goal of education is to give back to the community. From my perspective, language learning has educational purpose. It’s not just a one-way communication. Rather, students are learning from the teacher, and the teacher are also learning from the students. Moreover, I want my students to look back many years from now and still be able to say they remember this class.
Working on reaching communicative competence/ Whole-person education
In class, we talked about four elements of communicative competence, which are linguistic competence, sociolingustic competence, discourse competence and finally strategic competence. This is what I was looking for among students. I want my student to walk out my classroom and be able to reach communicative competence or at least working on that direction. Also, reaching communicative competence fits the idea of whole-person education. I am not expecting the students to be a robot. I want them to be able to socialize and improve themselves from all ares, not just getting a perfect score on grammar.
Communicative Language Teaching
In class, we discussed the advantages of CLT and some criticism about the technique. However, I still want to include that in my teaching philosophy since it emphasizes on
Krashen’s theory + McLaughlin’s theory
Most people think McLaughlin’s theory will be boring when it applies to actual classroom. However, I think based on my experience, McLaughlin’s theory is a faster way to help students improve their English for academic purposes. In addition, I was fascinated by Krashen’s theory so I am looking forward to using the combination of both theories. I would have different task-based assignment that’s adopted from Krashen’s theory and McLaughlin’s theory. So students can improve not only their reading and writing, but also speaking and listening.
Meaningful learning
In the lecture, I really enjoyed the principles of meaningful learning, which are A) Activate background knowledge (schemata), B) Connect new knowledge to background knowledge (subsumption) and C) Organize new knowledge. That’s why I want to include that in my teaching philosophy. From my perspective, if students can’t relate to you or you can’t active their background knowledge, it will be a struggle for both the teacher and the students. Furthermore, students may have trouble communicating their needs with teacher since they might feel like they don’t have any common language with him or her. As a teacher, I don’t want to see my students memorizing all these vocabularies and at the end of the day, they didn’t know what they are reading or speaking.
Organized learning process
The last principle I had is organized learning process. I want my teaching instruction can follow attention -- comprehension -- organization -- rehearsal -- storage routine. Therefore, based on this process, I will organize different project for different stage. Especially I would focus on the attention and the storage stage. Since most students nowadays have a short attention span, I want to grab their attention in the first few minutes of the class. What’s more, at the end of the class, I will have evaluation to check if they are actually stored the knowledge.
- First and foremost, students are coming from various culture background, representing cultural diversities.
- Secondly, students are falling into the age group between 16 to 21.
- Lastly, students will have some sort of English language proficiency, or receive some language training.
Inspiring
The foundation of my teaching philosophy is that I want my content to be inspiring. When students arrive in my class, I want them to be inspired and to welcome the challenge. I want my content to be something people will see from a Pinterest board. When people go on Pinterest, they are very vague about what they are looking for, no matter it is about wedding planning or clothes shopping. But after seeing all these inspirations, they can distinguish what they like and what they don’t like. More importantly, people will come up with better ideas of what they want and accomplish it. That’s what I was looking for in my classroom.
Amusing
Being under the Chinese education system for almost my entire life, it came with great responsibility and burden. However, I don’t want my students to go through such a heavy load of study with their language learning. Instead, I want to create a less stressful environment by making the content amusing. There’s nothing wrong with learning in a fun and relaxing environment.
Educating
This is another core idea of my teaching philosophy. My role model once told me, the final goal of education is to give back to the community. From my perspective, language learning has educational purpose. It’s not just a one-way communication. Rather, students are learning from the teacher, and the teacher are also learning from the students. Moreover, I want my students to look back many years from now and still be able to say they remember this class.
Working on reaching communicative competence/ Whole-person education
In class, we talked about four elements of communicative competence, which are linguistic competence, sociolingustic competence, discourse competence and finally strategic competence. This is what I was looking for among students. I want my student to walk out my classroom and be able to reach communicative competence or at least working on that direction. Also, reaching communicative competence fits the idea of whole-person education. I am not expecting the students to be a robot. I want them to be able to socialize and improve themselves from all ares, not just getting a perfect score on grammar.
Communicative Language Teaching
In class, we discussed the advantages of CLT and some criticism about the technique. However, I still want to include that in my teaching philosophy since it emphasizes on
- 1) Students practice using the language in a variety of contexts
- 2)Students use the language creatively to express their own meaning,
- 3)Students practice using the language for a variety of tasks and functions, and
- 4) The development of accuracy is encouraged through error correction and practice.
Krashen’s theory + McLaughlin’s theory
Most people think McLaughlin’s theory will be boring when it applies to actual classroom. However, I think based on my experience, McLaughlin’s theory is a faster way to help students improve their English for academic purposes. In addition, I was fascinated by Krashen’s theory so I am looking forward to using the combination of both theories. I would have different task-based assignment that’s adopted from Krashen’s theory and McLaughlin’s theory. So students can improve not only their reading and writing, but also speaking and listening.
Meaningful learning
In the lecture, I really enjoyed the principles of meaningful learning, which are A) Activate background knowledge (schemata), B) Connect new knowledge to background knowledge (subsumption) and C) Organize new knowledge. That’s why I want to include that in my teaching philosophy. From my perspective, if students can’t relate to you or you can’t active their background knowledge, it will be a struggle for both the teacher and the students. Furthermore, students may have trouble communicating their needs with teacher since they might feel like they don’t have any common language with him or her. As a teacher, I don’t want to see my students memorizing all these vocabularies and at the end of the day, they didn’t know what they are reading or speaking.
Organized learning process
The last principle I had is organized learning process. I want my teaching instruction can follow attention -- comprehension -- organization -- rehearsal -- storage routine. Therefore, based on this process, I will organize different project for different stage. Especially I would focus on the attention and the storage stage. Since most students nowadays have a short attention span, I want to grab their attention in the first few minutes of the class. What’s more, at the end of the class, I will have evaluation to check if they are actually stored the knowledge.