Teaching Philosophies

After interviewing a Kindergarten teammate of mine, I realized that we share many of the same philosophies when it comes to teaching literacy to our young learners.

Here is our list:

Respectful and Caring relationships with both the students and their parents is key.  For many of our students this is their first experience in school and building a trusting relationship is a must to get their educational process started.  It is also important that parents realize that educating their child is a team effort, not just the job of the teacher.

Teachers need to meet student’s literacy needs where they come in and use what they know about the student to build for their learning success.

Teaching literacy needs to include a comprehensive, balanced, and differentiated program of instruction. This program would include the five critical elements of a comprehensive, research-based literacy curriculum, which are phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Students need direct explicit instruction in all 5 areas of literacy, phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.

Students should be assessed and monitored on a regular basis and their instructional needs should be matched with teacher instruction.

Reading and writing should not be taught as separate subjects but integrated in the curriculum.

Students should be taught using current best practices.

Students should be engaged in writing for authentic purposes.

Students need to be given choices in their learning to enhance intrinsic motivation around reading and writing.

Students need to be given the time and opportunity to talk about and share their learning with other students.

In order to live up to this philosophy and meet the needs of our young learners we both agree that all Kindergarten classes should meet all day every day free of any tuition.