Our First Assignment - Philosophy

Introduction:
It has been said that any consistent educational program will produce intellectual gain. It has also been said that even the best program, inconsistently applied, will fail. If these statements are correct, then as teachers we might be better served to focus on consistency than figuring out the perfect plan for our teaching and our students. The best way to guarantee consistency is to tap into our own core beliefs and our honest goals.  These are the things we unconsciously return to time after time.  And by examining and thereby exposing them, we can build from the foundation and make any adjustments or changes that might help our teaching.  Trying to make these adaptations without first acknowledging our underlying beliefs can be futile.  The primary goal of this academy is to help you build a consistent framework from which to teach, assess, and evaluate yourself and your students.  In these times, when there are literally thousands of techniques, resources, programs, etc. out there for teachers, it is critical that you know what compliments your “system” and how to integrate these tools. We will start with your philosophy of education.
Philosophy:
Philosophy can be such a difficult word sometimes in strange ways.  I have studied philosophy for many years, and I hate it when I am asked the question, “what is your philosophy of teaching?”  Honestly, I don’t think there is a philosophy of education, but there is philosophy that affects education – philosophic beliefs transcend one activity like teaching.  Trying to produce a quick statement for someone with a short attention span can actually overwhelm me!  I know they really don’t want to know about my philosophy, that would take days I think.  Maybe they want to know my beliefs about education or my thoughts about how I should educate.  But explaining my philosophy is something much more complex. When I think of philosophy, I think about three areas: Ontology, Axiology, and Epistemology.
Ontology concerns itself with the nature of things. Questions like “what is the nature of matter?” or “what does it mean to exist?” are ontological.  For me as a teacher, the question “what does it mean to be human” is very important.  After all, I am placed right in the middle of a student’s life as she/he continues to develop as a human being. As a teacher, I have a role in this development or evolution.  I cannot be here at this point, working with him/her and not affect this progress. Do I work within this place (in the middle of their development as humans) and only teach them, thinking I am not affecting other important issues?  Or do I accept a larger role while working with my students, and how do I attend to these different needs?
Given that we agree we are not just simply passing on specific information, and that we are helping to develop and define young human beings, what are our beliefs about what those humans should be?  More importantly, what are our beliefs about basic human nature?  Are humans naturally good or bad?  Do humans prefer challenges or the simplest paths? Are humans fundamentally different than animals? If so, how? Do we really apprehend and understand reality? Can we ever really “know” each other, each other’s minds?  Opinions on these and many other questions would certainly lead to us to treat our students in specific ways.  So, what do you believe?

Question 1
What do you believe about human nature? Be specific – state your beliefs and support them. You can use the observations and questions above, but you are not restricted to them.

 Axiology deals with ethics and aesthetics.  For our purposes here, we will focus on ethics.  Ethics are not what we are (like ontology), they are what we should do.  You can probably see the relationship between ethics and ontology, after all, your beliefs about ontology most likely dictate your notion of ethics.  As teachers, we spend a great deal of time focusing on what students should do, but I am not always sure they understand the reasons behind these prescribed behaviors, and maybe we don’t either.  Most would agree that students learn much of their sense of ethics and morals at school, so we are directly involved in this responsibility.  Ethics are our beliefs about appropriate thoughts and behaviors, and the conduct we should engage to live a good life.  Obviously, people have different ideas about these thoughts, behaviors, and conduct.
I am sure you are very familiar with issues related to ethics, and are pretty comfortable with your own sense of right and wrong. It is likely you are also confident in directing and advising your students in these matters.  I would like to focus on something a bit different here though, the difference between “school” and “life” ethics.  It has been argued (by me amongst others) that in order to operate a classroom learning setting, we sometimes need to foster a different sense of ethics than we would suggest for other real world settings.  This was very interesting to me when I first noticed this dichotomy.  Here are a few questions that might illustrate the point: When we teach students to take tests and quizzes by themselves without any assistance, are we preparing them for similar experiences in the real world?  Does waiting your turn always benefit you in life?  Do we teach students how to protest appropriately?  Do we teach them how to disagree with us?  Do we focus more on compliance or creativity in our classrooms?  Which one is more important in the outside world? Why?  The ethics of teaching and controlling twenty-five to forty children in a classroom might not be natural after all.

Question 2
Do you agree with the idea that the ethics we teach and use in the classroom might not be the same students should learn for the real world?  Why or why not? Give details and examples

Epistemology is the study of how we know and how we learn.  There is an important distinction here – we should examine how we learn and know before we deal with how we should teach!  This is often overlooked. We have all heard that teachers may teach the way they learned themselves instead of the way their students might learn best. To make matters worse, people who learn easily and love it often become teachers who then teach people who don’t learn easily and who don’t love it.  Finally, there is a long established bias that a teacher has two levels of expertise – domain and pedagogical, and that these skills flip-flop with the age of the students being taught.  Domain expertise is the subject knowledge of their field.  Pedagogical expertise is the ability to teach their subject knowledge.  We often assume that students learn how to learn relatively quickly and that their teachers need to have a great deal of pedagogical skills early in the process, but then need to have much greater domain knowledge higher in the educational sequence.  The only problem with this naïve notion is that somehow the world has been led to believe that these two skills (domain and pedagogical) are limited, and most teachers are far better at one than the other. So you might hear someone state that a first grade teacher doesn’t have to know much, but that he/she should know how to teach. Likewise, a university professor doesn’t need to know how to teach well, but she/he should be complete experts in their field.  Who says these things are mutually exclusive?

Question 3
What would schooling look like if teachers at every level accepted the fact that they had to be equally proficient at teaching as they were with their subject knowledge?  Would it be different? If so, how? Be specific.