MY PHILOSOPHY

My Career as a School teacher

All human beings are lifelong learners.

To answer, as a teacher, to that assertion is a major challenge, a great opportunity, and a heavy responsibility.

During my professional career as a teacher, I developed a strong sensibility for the needs of my students and on many occasions I felt overwhelmed by the impossibility to support their commitment and positively contribute to their fulfillment. Institutional learning, although necessary, has many limits and strict boundaries. So I started to develop my own project of education, supported by a personal philosophy. This project is not intended to substitute any form of institutional (public or private) school system, but rather offer personalized resources, tools and methods to any “lifelong learners” who should be willing to improve their literacy and mastery of any school subject or field of interest, regardless of their age and available time.

In order to do that I’m offering online and residential private lessons and tutoring support, in accordance with those guiding learning principles:

  • Learner’s centered;
  • Constructivist;
  • Multilingual;
  • Blended (virtual/brick&mortar).

Learner’s centered: because learning is a constructive process that occurs best when what is being learned is relevant and meaningful to the learner and when the learner is actively engaged in creating his/her own knowledge and understanding by connecting what is being learned with prior knowledge and experience.

Constructivism

As the U.S. National Research Council, stated in 2007:

The meaning of ‘knowing’ has shifted from being able to remember and repeat information to being able to find and use it. Therefore, any effective approach to learning should be based on constructivism, that is:

When learners encounter something new, they have to reconcile it with their previous ideas and experience, sometimes changing what they believe, or sometimes discarding the new information as irrelevant. Learners, then, become active creators of their own knowledge rather than passive recipients of ideas gleaned from the textbook or from the teacher. In order to construct new knowledge, students must ask questions, explore, and reflect on what they have learned.

The teacher is a facilitator who assesses the learners’ pre-existing conceptions and guides the activity to address and build on the learners’ ideas. By designing problem-solving and inquiry-based learning activities, the teacher encourages learners to formulate and test their ideas, draw conclusions and inferences, and communicate their new knowledge in a collaborative learning environment.

Assessment

The Center On Learning, Assessment, and School Structure (CLASS) proposes an Assessment System which calls for measuring rigorous, real-world use of knowledge that also would provide better, more timely feedback to students, teachers, and parents.”

The CLASS assessment system stresses “backward design” — looking at what you want the student to know or be able to do and building your curriculum to accomplish that — lays our three steps to do this: 

  1. Identify desired results;
  2. Determine acceptable evidence;
  3. Plan the learning experiences and instruction.

The best instrument I found in order to grant the application of these learning/teaching principles is the Literacy Collaborative Design.

Multilanguage and Blended Learning

My aim is also to provide the opportunity for a multi-language education with a global perspective, nurturing the learner by a stimulating support full of inspiration, challenge, and achievement in more than one world language, within the context of a forward-looking approach, in both English and their Mother Tongue and/or a second/third fluent language, in order to become informed global citizen.

And, finally, a blended learning: because learning is more effectively individualized online.  Online instruction can be carefully planned out and prepared to meet many learning styles; while the same lesson plans and assignments are present for all learners, learners may be working on things at different times.