Every teacher should have a philosophy!

My Philosophy for Globally Oriented Education

“During the middleschool years, young teens undergo multiple physical, social emotional, andintellectual changes that shape who they are and how they function as adults”. This is the time when seeds of the adult life are sown and sprouted. Middle school is a space of tension because of “…the need for middle schools to ease the transition from elementary school, with an emphasis on the developmental needs of young teens, versus the need to facilitate the transition to high school, with an emphasis on academic rigor”,”, (Juvonen et al). And this is when I taught maths to students!

It may seem very narrow to some, but my curricular decisions, developments and all that I have done in education was provoked by the utter phobia for maths I saw among a lot of students in my classes. Phobia “…may be defined as a feeling of anxiety that stops one from efficiently tackling mathematical problems”, (Raghunathan, 2012). They were riddled with low self-esteem, believing that they are fools because they are not good at maths, and would often chase me for few marks after each summative to get their overall grade up. I believed with all my heart that this was something very false in education, although I was a new teacher, all of 23 years and did not know what to do!

My work to face this over 20 years spent in the classrooms of schools spanning traditional education, free progress and IB resulted in chiseling out my philosophy. This was based on ‘humane connection’, for “…what you realize is that connection is why we're here. It's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives”. I realized that for me, the purpose of education was to learn to build humane connection with the students or relationships. “And to me, the hard part of the one thing that keeps us out of connection is our fear that we're not worthy of connection” (Brown). The students with low self-esteem did not believe that I would accept them and I would keep hearing, ‘I can’t believe that you talk to me for I suck at math!’

My philosophy has been chiseled out at two levels, Inner and Outer.

The Inner – Mindful Relationships

 “Mindfulness meditation asks us to suspend judgment and unleash our natural curiosity about the workings of the mind, approaching our experience with warmth and kindness, to ourselves and others”, (Getting started with mindfulness). This is what helped me to be aware of my own conditioned response to some students and get over it. That in turn worked towards accepting them fully and build a relationship of acceptance by suspending my judgment. I look at students as human beings in full expansiveness and not through the small window of ‘performance in maths’. I opened myself, learnt to live “…with vulnerability and to stop controlling and predicting”, (Brown). “Vulnerability is basically uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure".

This relaxed the students, adolescents, as my base is middle school, for they felt accepted unconditionally. The sense of safety that they felt enhanced learning. “"From a neuroscience perspective, learning is a change in the receptivity of cells brought about by neural connections formed, strengthened, and connected with others …” (Schunk). To expose myself emotionally, I stepped off my authority as a maths teacher and became one of the adults with the kids. It was a risk for having an attitude of ‘I love you as you are’ could have had students taking it easy, but surprisingly it never happened!

Not only did I connect with them, I also made it a culture of the classes for students to be kind and empathic to the others. As the schools I worked in were inclusive school, I found that it was needed for students to be empathic to each other. I did whatever was needed for this, such as (a) going out into the field and playing cricket with the class, (b) trying different types of collaborative learning, (c) bringing in buddy system in the classes or (d) having extensive discussions with the students on relating to each other. It was not very hard as students of middle school are open to listening to rational perspectives if conveyed positively. This is what sowed the seeds for the global mind-set of empathy, compassion and kindness among the students.

The Outer – The curricula

The outer is how I teach maths. The tools and techniques of teaching and assessing. “Two factors strongly influence whether the brain pays attention to a piece of information: (1). If the information has meaning. (2). If the information causes an emotional response”, (Sun Protection Outreach by Students).

To make maths classes meaningful, I brought in context in maths by answering each time the question ‘why are we learning this?’ was raised by the students. “…to make learning meaningful—and thereby build more extensive neural connections—teachers should incorporate context as much as possible” (Schunk). I brought in real life applications to answer the questions incessantly put by the students. I brought in History to give a perspective to the evolution of maths. I made them explore the ‘what, why, how, who and where’ of maths.

"Youcan take any unit and change it a little so that students really start to seethe world globally,". I integrated maths with global issues. For example, data handling became the time to explore population growth; ratio brought in human sex ratio; calculus brought in the question of war as the time of innovation and symmetry brought in a deep reflection of teenage life, (Kochar, 2011).

To make the class emotionally positive, I used variety of strategies. Collaboration, flip the class, use of colours in the notebooks, projects, self-assessment, peer assessment and problem solving. There was also a steady rhythm created by the routine of work with feedback on regular basis. As I moved from national to international curriculum, the diversity of students widened more and more. In attempting to include all kinds of learners, my toolbox of strategies grew. Gradually my classes were an integration of life skills, Multiple Intelligence and Perspective.

Conclusion

What kind of a human am I creating? The road to my philosophy stems from trying to answer this question. It is an exploration and an inquiry into my own mind-set to question the kind of human-being I am moving towards. As the layers of conditioning peeled off, I realized “…that vulnerability is the core of shameand fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it appears that it’s alsothe birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love”. When I stand before a student deeply open emotionally, a connection is formed and creativity explodes fully into it.