My Teaching Philosophy
What We Have to Learn to Do, We Learn by Doing. —Aristotle
A lesson I’ve learned over and over again throughout my life and my teaching is that just reading about something is usually not enough to learn it. Without a context in which to place new information, it is so difficult to deconstruct and really understand the facts and ideas supposed to be learned.
I studied chemistry and biology in high school and college but always did poorly because I couldn’t make sense of the molecular diagrams and anatomical schematics. But after starting a saltwater aquarium and being faced with the immediacy of keeping living things alive, the biology of the creatures I kept and the chemistry of the soup in which they lived gave context to all this information that I had seen before but of which I previously couldn’t quite make sense.
Similarly, while I could give definitions for noun, adjective, adverb, and other grammatical terms through most of my educated life, it was not until studying ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic in college that these words truly took on meaning. No longer was I simply memorizing the fact that “a verb is an action word,” but I was learning about sentence structure in a context that fascinated me and this, as a result, solidified the new knowledge and gave the learning meaning. Accordingly, the pieces fell into place. To this day I think of Egyptian, not English, when identifying parts of speech.
My philosophy of teaching is heavily influenced by the idea that one must learn by doing. So much of learning requires seeing enough of something to be able to ask questions about it. To learn something, one needs to live it.
When I teach, I try to give my students that greater context to arouse their curiosity and allow them to ask questions. This idea closely parallels the Learning Cycle used by science educators: Engage, Explore, Explain, Extend, and Evaluate. In order to engage and explore, there has to be a level or curiosity and excitement among the learners. Only on this foundation can pursuant layers of learning be built.