Teaching Philosophy: Motivation, Social Interaction, Discovery And Cooperative Learning

My Teaching Philosophy

As a teacher, my philosophy is to organize classroom, knowledge, information, activities in order to provide my students an active, learner-centered environment. Moreover, in my opinion, there are some crucial elements of my philosophy; Motivation, Social-interaction, Creativity, Communication, Multiple Intelligences, and also Meaningful, Discovery and Cooperative Learning.

Motivation is the process that sustains behavior. As a teacher, we have to keep our students motivated. Thus, the more motivated they are, the more learning process occurs effectively. In this way, positive reinforcement may help us balance our young children’s motivation. As I consider, reinforcement is somehow behaviorist approach but if we become

However, just in order to expand my point of view, I have chosen Social-interactionism. Aristotle (Aristot. Pol. 1.1253a) states that “the human being is by nature a social animal”. Piaget (1952) indicates that “students construct knowledge by transforming and organizing the prior knowledge and information”. Vygotsky (1978) says “students construct knowledge through social interactions with others”. These citations, I think, refer that young learners are affected by social environment. As we know, everyone interacts with people or objects around us. It is a lifelong process we have. If I consider the young learners, they are good at pronunciation and learn English language inductively. This means that they don’t make any effort to learn the language. It is unconscious learning. For me, the best way to acquire the language is to grasp knowledge unconsciously. Children are more likely to retain information longer in this way. This knowledge can be influenced by the culture and the language (intonation, stress etc.) of the society. As a teacher, we should improve our students’ understanding about the language they learn. According to Vygotsky (1978), all learning occurs in a cultural context and includes social interaction. As we know ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development), this is what teachers should do indeed. We have to provide support and help our students how to construct their knowledge. On the other hand, this stage can be a little different regarding acquiring knowledge. As I observe, adults can be more likely deductive learners. They have abstract thinking developed and they know what they do while learning the language. In short, conscious learning occurs. That makes a difference between adult learners from young learners in learning process. And also, Bruner indicates a technique which is named “Scaffolding”. Scaffolding