Philosophy

Educational Theories

I leaned toward the Constructivism philosophy in that the students would be active learners who would construct their own frame of thought. Being a special education major my classes have often focused on how the brain works and the fact that not every student thinks the same way. This makes the constructivist philosophy more relevant for me than some of the others.

When my first group looked at Humanism, it was stated that the aspect of rejecting a group was not readily agreed with. I however was able to share some thoughts on that with a classmate and I felt that the word was not meant to mean small intimate groups of learners or even classrooms but to mean a large generic way of educating a larger population. Taken this way the humanism philosophy would be my close second as it focuses on the individual as special education does.

Every one of us has many facets to our personality, and when asked certain questions and given a multiple choice of answers to chose from we determine what educational theory best suits us. Or do we? I think that a lot more goes into our thought processes each time we answer a question. We may have different answers at different times of the day, our answers could very depending on our mood or even on what kind of day we are having.
Getting to know who we are as people is an ever developing and changing process. That being said…

I fell into the student centered theories. I do believe that I am more “student centered” than “teacher centered” as I feel that as a teacher and as an adult one should be able to handle themselves and their classroom without thinking about it. It should be one of those things that comes naturally, keeping a safe and effective, nurturing environment is a given in my mind. The student is the biggest variable in the equation. My career focuses more on the variable than on the whole equation, therefore my outcome was somewhat expected. Was my outcome determined by my education background or by my personal choices? I would like to think that my personal choices determined my educational path so that they both had an effect on the questions that I answered and the overall outcome.

In class we also discussed that it is necessary to shift from the student centered philosophies to the teacher centered when safety becomes an issue. I can see this happening frequently in the Gen. Ed. Classroom with a multiple of students and personalities in one room. Perhaps it would be a good idea to have two different teaching styles in one room. Co-teaching with a special educator and a General Education teacher would be the ideal for me and my personal philosophy and teaching style.