My Educational Philosophy and Psychological Orientation

After having just finished taking Philosophy of Education this past spring semester, I had a feeling about what my results to this survey would be. As I expected, my educational philosophy lined up most with progressivism, with an overall score of 22. I believe that the curriculum should be somewhat planned out going into the school year to provide at least some amount of structure and order, but should also be flexible enough to take into account the interests and needs of the students. If the students' interests are considered when designing and implementing the curriculum, they will be much more likely to want to learn the material. Also, students should be provided with the freedom and responsibility to achieve their own individual potentials. If they are chained down by a set curriculum, they will either get bored or begin to act out once they reach their academic limits in that confined setting. As a teacher, I should establish a democratic classroom where students feel like they have a say in what they are going to learn and how they are going to learn it. This might involve several group projects in which students can express their personal opinions and learn to tolerate opposing opinions from fellow classmates. This will also be a classroom environment where students have the opportunity to learn independently by reflecting on what they have experienced and relating it to their past experiences. This will help them not only remember new information and skills, but to help them grow as individual thinkers.

We also discussed various means of information acquisition in my class to describe how people learn. As I expected, my psychological orientation lined up most with cognitivism/constructivism, with an overall score of 23. I believe that students make their own meanings and construct their own understandings by actively experiencing new things and information. This is in opposition to the traditional way of teachers transmitting new information, which is typically in a lecture format. Under this theory, teachers should be viewed as facilitators, providing students with opportunities to have these experiences and construct meanings of their own. When students are confronted with situations that conflict with their current understandings, they will feel a natural inclination to make meaning and reconcile the new information with the old information, facilitating learning. As a teacher, it will be my job to scaffold information based on their prior experiences and understandings. By understanding what level each student is at developmentally, I can present information in different ways so that each student is able to construct meaning out of it and form new understandings.

Overall, I think that it is extremely important that a new teacher enters their profession with an educational philosophy and psychological orientation in order to have a direction towards which they want to lead their class. However, it is important to keep in mind that these views might begin to shift once they begin teaching and fully interacting with the students, so teachers should also always be open to change depending on the needs of their students.