Intellectual Framework
The following components of my professional and academic experiences have heavily influenced my teaching philosophy and serve as the driving motivation behind this project.
Education Gurus
The first education guru who I really studied and admired (outside of my own teachers) was Lucy Calkins, founder of The Reading and Writing Project out of Columbia University's Teachers' College. Her fundamental belief that educators must meet every child where they are in order to pull them up to the next level is one that I have adopted and never will abandon. The Reading and Writing Project systematizes teaching children to love reading and writing, which, along with the implementation of differentiated instruction, I will carry into working with college students. In my pedagogy courses during my MA program at Georgetown, I was pleasantly surprised to read the works of Donald Murray (e.g., "Teaching Writing as a Process Not Product") and Sheridan Blau (The Literature Workshop) and learn about their direct and indirect influences on Calkins. It was refreshing to recognize a pattern in others'
pedagogical philosophies that aligned with my own beliefs and offered a vocabulary for the concepts I knew I believed in. For my full teaching philosophy, click here.
Other Literature that Influences My Practice
Mentors, Professors, and Colleagues
I recently wrote an e-mail to my second-grade teacher (or someone with the same last name who teaches at the elementary school I went to) to thank her for the incredible compassion and love that she taught with daily. In the e-mail, I recalled her "smart bean" jellybeans that she distributed when we worked hard, the space she gave us in the classroom to step away and work out peer conflicts on our own, and the goodbye messages she had my classmates record for me when I had to move to another school. I know that teachers like Ms. Kim influenced my own decision to become an educator who strives to provide individualized attention and care to each student. In college, one professor in particular, Dan Porterfield, demonstrated a similar type of investment in each of his hundreds of students, even sending birthday and holiday cards to alumni, much to our delight and surprise. He encouraged me to apply for Teach for America before I knew I was capable of taking on such a challenge. Dr. Porterfield's willingness to see his students' potential is a trait I try to replicate in my own teaching.