My Philosophy of Education
If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
— Bruce Lee
The way I create an environment that promotes a meaningful and memorable learning experience is based on Bruce Lee’s (1971) thoughts on the nature of water. Water flows—it adjusts, finding a way around or through an object. Over time, the object is shaped by the water, and the water is also shaped by the object.
As a teacher, I do not enter a classroom with a set of The Rules, ready to impose and enforce them through authority. To do so would be an invitation for resistance: Why should we listen to this guy who just walked into the classroom? I view myself as a collaborator in creating a community of mutual empathy, respect and open-mindedness. Constructivism, as a result, is a theory that has made its way into all facets of my practice. Vygotsky (1978) asserted that learning is first a result of interactions in social contexts, and then as personal exploration and reflection upon constructed knowledge (p.57). I introduce my students to this style of learning by focusing foremost on developing a classroom community—they define an ideal vision of their classroom, discuss what acceptable behaviours look and sound like, and agree upon how we can demonstrate respect and empathy for one another. Throughout this process, I ensure that they understand their shared responsibility shaping their learning space.
This is the first step in an ongoing process of developing positive rapport and trust between myself and my students—it’s the foundation for a practice based on reflexivity, collaboration and exploration. When my students have an active role in shaping their community, they develop the support and feeling of confidence that allows for measured risk-taking in the classroom.
My approach to teaching relies similarly on constructivism. Boghossian (2006) situates constructivism in the classroom, stating “students are active participants in a learning process by seeking to find meaning in their experiences [and] the result becomes knowledge” (p.714). Given the broad range of information sources available, I would be naive to assume that my knowledge is infallible. As a business teacher, my knowledge is constantly challenged as a result of external factors (e.g. a pandemic) that suddenly change how business is conducted. While certain concepts and skills are foundational, my role is less about teaching absolutes, and more about developing capacity for critical thought and evaluation so that students can make personally meaningful connections between course content and new information.
In the context of instructional design, learning objectives are already prescribed through the curriculum that I teach; however, I incorporate constructivism into my lesson and unit design by working with my students to co-construct a continuum of success criteria that defines each learning objective. The result is that my classes are able to define and take ownership of their experience with a clear sense of how they are expected to demonstrate their knowledge. Similarly, taking the same approach for summative assessment reinforces the sense of agency over learning and creates an incentive to engage deeply with course content and each other. This practice also allows me to create lessons and open-ended assessments that meet the needs of my students, and is an opportunity to identify which skills require further development during instruction.
The best lessons that I have observed as a teacher and administrator are the ones that positioned the student as a doer. Brown et al. (1989) assert that “people who use tools in authentic activity build an increasingly rich implicit understanding of both the tools themselves and the world in which they use those tools” (p.4). As a business management teacher, the position of student-as-doer is critical: while I teach about business in the conceptual sense, the depth of my students’ learning is gauged according to their ability to apply business tools, techniques and theories to novel situations. Thus, activities that reflect real-world scenarios (e.g. stock market trading simulations, business plan development, sales pitches) are key components in ensuring that knowledge is not learned discretely according to individual units; rather, it reinforces effective application by requiring students to connect all parts of the business management course (and other subjects as well) in response to the demands of a given problem.
In this context, I rely on Resnick’s (2007) model of the kindergarten approach to learning. Students adopt a “spiraling process” (p.2) of imagining, creating, playing, and sharing and reflecting. In using a case-based/simulation approach to teach business, students imagine ideal outcomes, create a model of solutions, play with/manipulate external factors that could affect their model, and share their scenario with their classmates. Finally, reflection occurs as an individual and group activity, and is an opportunity to dissect what went right, what went wrong, and what should be further explored. The spiral commences again with the next case study or simulation. The effect of this model is compounding, allowing students to draw from and apply a constantly growing amount of information that they have critically discussed with their peers, and evaluated based on their knowledge of past scenarios based on real-world events.
My ultimate goal as a teacher, in addition to delivering course-specific content, is to ensure that my instructional design practices help my students develop the skills they need to appropriately deal with the challenges that they will encounter in a 21st century workplace. According to the World Economic Forum (2016), these skills include sociocultural awareness, collaboration, adaptability, curiosity, and critical thinking/problem-solving (p.4). By developing these skills through the integration of constructivism, situated learning, and sound instructional design practices, I will ensure that I continue to set my students up for academic success and the world that lies beyond the classroom.
References
Boghossian, P. (2006). Behaviorism, Constructivism, and Socratic Pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 38(6), 713–722. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2006.00226.x
Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32–42.
CHCH TV. (9 December 1971). The Pierre Berton Show. Broadcast, Hamilton, Ontario.
Cole, M., John-Steiner, V., Scribner, S., & Souberman, E. (Eds.). (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. L. S. Vygotsky. (pp. xi, 159). Harvard U Press.
Resnick, M. (2007). All I really need to know (about creative thinking) I learned (by studying how children learn) in kindergarten. Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity & Cognition - C&C ’07, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1145/1254960.1254961
World Economic Forum. (January 2016). New vision for education: Fostering social and emotional learning through technology. Geneva: World Economic Forum.