Teaching is a career that I have always admired and respected. Although underappreciated most of the time, teachers are the facilitators of the knowledge that we have acquired leading up to now. It is fascinating how, although, we are all future educators with the same goal in mind of helping students learn, we are all going to be facilitating our classrooms very differently. We have seen multiple types of teachers and educators throughout all our lives, some better than others but we can all agree that they all have instilled something in us that has allowed us to be the person we are today. The best classroom and teacher experiences I have ever had were the ones where the teacher encouraged me to critically think of my own thoughts and opinions but as well helped me transfer my knowledge to the real world. With that being said, as a future educator myself, I aspire to, not only, stimulate my students with classroom course material but as well as encourage them to express themselves and their knowledge to the world around them. As I mentioned before, teachers all teach differently based on what they believe is best for them and their students. Many of these beliefs and ideas come from very influential theorists that have changed the education system dramatically with their research and experiments. Some theories that have inspired and influenced my teaching philosophy are, constructivism, transfer of knowledge and critical pedagogy.

   Piaget’s constructivist theory is the foundation of my views towards what education should be. Piaget argued that students learn and produce knowledge based on their experiences and environment. In order to successfully build on and impact students learning is by giving stimulating lessons that they would be able to carry for the rest of their lives. Freire’s critical pedagogy theory emphasizes the idea that educators should conduct lessons that not only encourages critical thinking of the course material but as well as gets the students to think about how the course material is seen outside the classroom and how we are socially affected by it. By practicing this theory in the classroom not only are students more engaged but as well are aware of the world around them and are using their knowledge to try to create a solution to these social problems. Finally, in hopes of instilling this into the classroom, I hope that my students are able to transfer their knowledge to the next classroom or to any field of work they are able to pursue. The idea of knowledge transfer essentially explains that through sharing and inputting knowledge through problem solving in any field, they are able to remember and create schema for the learned topic and contribute to solving a problem, whether that be at their job, next classroom or community. This is also the true key of student assessment. By having students be able to transfer and explain their knowledge and views of the topic, showcases that the students were, successfully, able to understand the lesson or topic being taught.

   Overall, students learn best when they are stimulated by a lesson that has a reason or an application to it. By adding that real world or social justice connection to the lesson, they are more prone to be engaged and will be able to build on their knowledge and furthermore, express their knowledge to others that will help solve a problem no matter how simple or complex. My experience of being able to teach through the Uteach program has allowed me to learn about these theories as well as practice them. The world of education is evolving and changing everyday, I hope to improve my philosophy of teaching as I continue to grow as an educator.