The Teachers’ Corner:

This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow as the night the day, Thou cans’t not then be false to any man (or woman).” (Hamlet I.iii.78-80.)

Before applying for my first teaching job, someone told me:  “You have to have a philosophy of education!”  I nodded agreeably and then walked away wondering:  “What in Sam Hill is a ‘philosophy of education’?”  The irony is that now that I am in the business of helping young teachers prepare for that first dreaded interview, I find myself saying:  “I think you need a philosophy of education!”  What time will do to one’s perceptions!

But hold on!  I am not about to set you on a long task of reading Piaget or Bruner or Bandura or others.  I am going to suggest another approach.  Rather than sitting down to write some latter day summa, I am going to suggest you build your “philosophy” around a few key questions.  These are not questions with easy answers nor are you going to find those answers on the internet.  They must come from you – from your knowledge, from your experience outside the world of education, from your training, from your faith, from your hopes and from your dreams.  In a word, they must come from what you believe.

So here are some questions I suggest teacher aspirants need to think about:

1.  What are the purposes of education as we know them in Western societies generally?

2.  Which of these purposes is in the ascendancy at the moment in your state or province?

3.  Which of these do I think you subscribe to most closely?

4.  What do you believe about students as learners?

5.  What do you believe about the role teachers play in learning?

6.  What constitutes, in your mind, an effective teacher? 

7.  What makes a good school?

8.  And how about this one:  It’s now thirty years from the day you started teaching and you are retiring.  Five students have been invited back to your retirement party and all five have been asked to speak about what you meant to them as a teacher.  What would you want them so say?

None of these can be answered with a few bullets.  If you can only think of a few bullets per question, you’ll have to do a lot more thinking and soul-searching.  These questions are not to be answered glibly or too simply.  They are essential to your success.

“How is this going to help me in my interview?” you ask.  Here’s how!  

If you can answer these questions fully and thoughtfully to yourself, you’ve just given yourself a personal springboard to answer any question interviewers throw at you.  The answers to these questions are the background beliefs that should infuse your answers and make your responses easier for you come by.  Your specific responses to questions will be far easier to articulate and you will come across as a person who has done some thinking about the profession and calling that you are about to enter.

Perhaps you have just internalized it into something that looks a bit like ….. an educational philosophy!

Dr. Dan

Check out our “Get Hired Series” webinar.  This topic is covered in the first webinar:  “Preparing for an Interview”