Education is not preparation for life, education is life itself.
- John Dewey
I feel this quote is a good introduction to my philosophy of education. I believe that education is learning from experiences you have and learning how to use those experiences in your life. As a Special Education teacher it will be important for me to understand how students’ experiences and life will affect their learning as much as I do. It will be important for me to take the experiences my students are having or may have already had and analyze how that will affect their educational experience and utilize that information when designing my lesson plans. Dewey’s theory of continuity and interaction I feel ties into my philosophy a lot. Continuity and interaction state how students’ past experiences will effect how they learn things now. These experiences are different from student to student. Even if two students have the same experiences they may place a different level of importance on the experience. This is one reason why I feel in special education differentiating instruction is so important. As a special education teacher I will keep my students’ experiences in mind. I will study how and what experience they apply importance to and use that to make lesson plans and activities.
My memory of my past educational experiences is closer to the traditional approach to education. Most of my classes consisted of taking notes and learning things from the past and then taking test to see if we could use it in the future. I did have a few classes that had more of a progressive style twist to them, those were my favorite classes. These classes allowed us choices as to what and how we were going to learn it. Although, there were still guidelines and the teachers always had a handle on the classroom, it was nice to be able to have some choice into how and what I was learning.
Observing in schools the past couple of semesters I have seen a lot different style of education I saw when I was in school. I feel like classrooms now are shying away from the traditional philosophy on education. I see teachers analyzing more what the students strengths and weakness are and using that when designing instruction as opposed to having one group lesson that they use over and over again. I also see that teachers are allowing students to make a lot more choices in their education. One thing I saw a lot of last semester in my field placement was teachers allowing students choose between 3 ways of assessing their progress as opposed to taking a test. This is something I hope to do in my future as a special educator.
In conclusion, I feel that continuity and interaction contribute greatly to how and what I student will want to learn and that teachers should take that into account when deciding how the classroom will work. I also feel that my continuing experience with education will teach me things I like and don’t like about other people philosophies. I will use these experience to develop and change my teaching philosophy.
