Individual Student Profile

Individual Student Profile

During my eleven years as a first grade teacher, I have learned the important lesson that each class I receive is incredibly diverse.  The children that I have had the privilege of teaching have each entered my classroom with a different set of needs, strengths, and challenges. For this reason, I have established a personal teaching philosophy that focuses on teaching the whole child.  My philosophy centers on the theory that the most important step you can take as a teacher is to make a personal connection with a student and learn their strengths, learning styles, and background.

Personal Philosophy of Learning

There is nothing more rewarding than establishing a love for lifelong learning within a child.  Therefore, I strongly believe you need to form a strong connection with a student and get to know how they learn best.  If I form a bond with a student and there is a mutual sense of trust, they will feel more comfortable taking risks. I believe every student is unique, and they enter my classroom with a unique set of needs, gifts, and diverse backgrounds.  It is my responsibility to understand each child and create a classroom that will meet their individual needs.

Learning and teaching go hand in hand. Classroom teachers need to constantly research new strategies to use with their students, and they also need to show enthusiasm about the content they are presenting!  If I am enthusiastic about the content and make it relevant to my student’s lives, they will make meaningful connections.  Teaching children to love learning and how to make connections to the content will help them to be problem solvers and critical thinkers. 

Goal Statement One

An important personal goal is to research and utilize preventive and supportive behavior strategies. Instead of focusing on punishments and consequences, I want to establish a set of expectations that students are motivated to meet in place of a list of rules. I would like to help students identify personal academic and behavioral goals that we can not only track together but celebrate together when their personal goals are reached.

Goal Statement Two

            My second goal is to educate myself on different inclusion strategies so special education students will feel more included and successful in the general education classroom. I have worked with many different special education students in my eleven years of teaching, but finding ways to make the content accessible and relevant can be a challenge when the content is too difficult for those particular students.  Our district is moving towards more push in minutes for special education students, and I want to maximize their success and confidence in my classroom.

Goal Statement Three

My third goal is to form a more personal connection with students and their families by improving communication. With the demands that are put on teachers, it is easy to forget that getting to know the child and their background is crucial to forming a connection. I want to make an effort to understand the role literacy plays in a child’s home life, and provide resources that will help parents to understand what their child is learning in the classroom.

Goal Statement Four

My final goal is to develop strong research skills and discover new online resources that will continue to enhance my teaching after I complete this master’s program. Learning and researching should never end. Education is a forever changing field and I would like to continue to research strategies to change my classroom after I have earned my degree.

Conclusion

The world we live in will continue to change and evolve around us, therefore the children we teach and the way we teach them will continue to change. It is important to embrace research so as educators we can adapt to the changes, and in turn we will teach our students to develop a lifelong love of learning so they can become productive citizens that relate to the ever changing world around them.