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My Educational Philosophies
Influences: John Dewey & Lev Vygotsky
Educational Philosophy
My educational philosophy at its core is student focused, keeping the student at the focus of education. I believe the student is responsible for participating and leading the choices in their education. The teacher's role is to create a suitable environment for the students to learn and reach their full potential. The teacher functions as a guide and a resource for students. The teacher can be considered another learner, who is exploring alongside the students. This allows facilitation of the learning process and experience that the student goes through to better understand and learn.
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The teacher should always work to guide original student thoughts, provoke learning situations, and keep in mind the learning needs/goals of students. Teachers should not tell students what to learn, but rather students should explore and lead their studies. This allows the students to find their own original thoughts and have in depth conversations and questions.
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The environment that the teacher creates is instrumental to the student's experience of learning. The environment can be a big factor, and can essentially be a passive teacher. The learning environment should be stimulating throughout, formulating itself as a resource for students. The classroom is not limited to physical space surrounded by walls. The classroom is only limited to what the student allows it to be. Wherever learning takes place is open to be considered a classroom.
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Philosophies of Language and Second Language Acquisition
I highly value my philosophy of language and second language acquisition (SLA). I believe that all teachers are teacher of language regardless of the content area or students. Through my education and experience at Purdue Fort Wayne in the TENL program, I developed and constructed my own philosophy of language and SLA. Attached below is a copy of my philosophy of language and SLA. I highly encourage you to take a look at how I view language and language acquisition.
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Goals
My main goal as an educator, which corresponds with my philosophy is to create an inviting environment that meets the learning needs of all students to be successful. Having this as my focus will bring to life a classroom that allows for students to explore and better understand the world and language presented to them through their own eyes and experiences.
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Another goal is to be language focused. Language is the means for all understanding and idea sharing. Keeping a language focused classroom is imperative because language shapes the way we interact with others and the way others react to us. In order for students to succeed later in life, they must be able to navigate social situations, professionally and informally. As an educator it is my responsibility to model language that is real and valuable to my students. I view language and linguistics as an exploratory science, with a growing field in our modern society. We as a society do not know what language is yet.
My goal is to give students to use relevant language that is pertinent to them and their needs/goals. I will give my students opportunities to produce language in meaningful contexts that are not arbitrary.
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