• Personal summary
  
• Resume
• Credentials
• Publications
• Family photo

• Philosophy of education
• Methods of teaching

• Rules and procedures
• Letter to parents

• Unit plan
• Lesson plans

• Assessment
• Self-assessment

My teaching philosophy is to be guided by the needs of students. I will be preparing lesson plans based on this needs and are rich in variety which at the same time meet the requirements of local, state, and national standards. The school curriculum and state standards will serve as a springboard to develop unit and lesson plans that would satisfy  needs of students.  Any plan aimed at fulfilling the different needs of students will outshine the rest of the plans which are only focusing on transmitting information without considering the needs. 

I have discovered the value of approaching needs assessment as means of teaching goal setting and measurement of achievements.

Need for growth

Therefore, needs assessment is the first consideration in organizing my lesson plans. Students are the primary stakeholders in the teaching-learning process. We will discuss what they already know and set goals to gether for what they need to achieve. Each of my lesson plan will  incorporate some kind of activity that students will express their needs to learn.
Diversified method of teaching that allows discussion will be prominent in my classroom. Students will be free to raise questions and find out the benefits of learning each lesson. I am making sure that any topic taught has meaning to their life and to the life of the society.

I believe that any material can be learned if the recipients are focused and the lesson is presented systematically. Any systematic presentation of a topic requires organized preparation, proper conveying of the message, making association between lessons, bringing out deeper values and relating it to real life. I have prepared a sample unit plan, unit overview chart and summary points based on Iowa teaching standards. 

Lessons presented should benefit both advancing and slow learning students. Therefore, I want my instructional techniques to vary regularly to maintain students competency and enable them achieve their goals and fulfill their desire of learning. Some of these strategies were implemened in my methods of teaching.

Different talents in a classroom require differentiation of the teaching strategies. I used these strategies while I was teaching ecology in Grade 9 at Woodson High School in Fairfax, Virginia.

They included: PowerPoint software, as a visual tool to present theoretical concepts and figures. This was supplemented with relevant pictures, videos, and hands-on activities (experiments) to help students understand the lesson. I emphasized selected key terms to help them grasp the concepts adequately. Terms were listed separately and students were asked if they understood the implication of each word in the context of the lesson taught.

I also found a value in group projects, because there are students who will gain more information by working in groups. There is simply no single learning style for the general school class. In my student teaching, I encouraged students to pick up biomes (major biotic communities on earth characterized by the dominant forms of plant life and the prevailing climate) at random and work in groups to find out information and present it to the class. This helped them to practice cooperative learning and also served as a means of sharing ample information in a short period of time (Please refer to video show, cooperative learning).  I used class discussions and cooperative learning as a way to establish good relationships among students as well as a means to share knowledge.

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