About the Author
"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go."
- Dr. Seuss
Children learn best when they're interested, creative, having fun, and can see for themselves that they're learning and growing. With that in mind, my philosophy of education revolves around two main areas: engagement and potential.
Learning doesn’t happen without engagement, so a primary focus of my teaching is in engaging children in high-interest, meaningful learning. This means establishing an authentic purpose for the learning so that the children see for themselves that it's relevant. Whether it's seeing that reading will help them learn to fold a great paper airplane, or that subtraction will help them to get the right amount of change in our class store, purpose drives engagement, and engagement then drives learning.
I also know that all children have their own unique and individual potentials. No two children share identical areas of strength or growth, and no two children reach their potentials at the same pace. In my classroom, children understand early on that everyone learns through effort, initiative, and even mistakes. After all, if we're not learning and trying, then why are we in school? My classroom fosters an environment of individual achievement that includes assessment, personalized learning goals, and recognition of progress toward those goals. Woven throughout is a supportive culture of effort and taking chances. As Albert Einstein said, "A person who never made a mistake never tried something new."
Currently, I'm a first grade teacher in Sunnyvale, CA, where I've been teaching for 7 years. Before teaching at the elementary level, I spent over a decade in high tech, where I wrote technical publications and both designed and taught professional education courses.
- Dr. Seuss
Children learn best when they're interested, creative, having fun, and can see for themselves that they're learning and growing. With that in mind, my philosophy of education revolves around two main areas: engagement and potential.
Learning doesn’t happen without engagement, so a primary focus of my teaching is in engaging children in high-interest, meaningful learning. This means establishing an authentic purpose for the learning so that the children see for themselves that it's relevant. Whether it's seeing that reading will help them learn to fold a great paper airplane, or that subtraction will help them to get the right amount of change in our class store, purpose drives engagement, and engagement then drives learning.
I also know that all children have their own unique and individual potentials. No two children share identical areas of strength or growth, and no two children reach their potentials at the same pace. In my classroom, children understand early on that everyone learns through effort, initiative, and even mistakes. After all, if we're not learning and trying, then why are we in school? My classroom fosters an environment of individual achievement that includes assessment, personalized learning goals, and recognition of progress toward those goals. Woven throughout is a supportive culture of effort and taking chances. As Albert Einstein said, "A person who never made a mistake never tried something new."
Currently, I'm a first grade teacher in Sunnyvale, CA, where I've been teaching for 7 years. Before teaching at the elementary level, I spent over a decade in high tech, where I wrote technical publications and both designed and taught professional education courses.