Cody Wilcox

4/26/15
EDU 202-1001
My Education Philosophy

I owe many thanks to my high school AP English teacher, Mr. Robert Parker, for
inspiring me to start down this path towards becoming a teacher. Mr. Parker instilled an
enthusiastic love of literature in me. In his class I discovered the joy of writing and reading,
analyzing, and discussing literature. Mr. Parker encouraged me to share my passion with future
generations by becoming a teacher. I learned a lot about the world of education from him and
even more from the classes I have taken already on my way to becoming an educator and the
field observations I have had the pleasure of experiencing. While Im sure it will be constantly
adapting as I learn and experience more and more, I now have my own personal education
philosophy.
As I teacher I plan on incorporating many of the pragmatist ideas popularized by John
Dewey and other influential figures in the Progressive education movement. I want to encourage
my students to be active and involved in their education. I dont want my students to regard
everything I say as gospel and nor do I want my students to be focused on fulfilling the
requirements of standardized testing. My students will be encouraged to explore their own
opinions, come to their own ideas, and feel excited to express and exchange this ideas with
others. I learned so much in high school from Mr. Parkers class thanks to our classroom
discussions. Rather than simply writing papers or answering multiple choice tests on the novels

we were reading, we discussed what we had read as class. Even students who rarely spoke up or
just goofed off in other classes were excited and actively involved in our discussions of the
themes, literary devices, and meanings found in our required reading. I observed this again from
the other side through my classroom observation. Placed in Ms. Lori Jorgensens Pre-AP English
class at Coronado High School I watched as students who slacked off or caused trouble on some
days lit up and got into the thick of the debates in class as they discussed the ideas of the novels
and articles that they had read in class. Giving students the freedom to find their own voice,
reaching their own opinions, and collaborate with their classmates to reach these conclusions
should instill a lifelong love of learning.
Another important issue I would like to touch on in my classroom is diversity of my
students, both culturally and in the ways they best learn. As a future English teacher I plan on
finding novels, plays, and poetry from a wide array of cultural backgrounds so that my students
can identify with a particular author or character that shares their heritage and to become more
empathic, open, and understanding of those from differing cultures. I plan on taking this
variation and involving it in my lessons so I can tackle the various learning strategies that best
work for my students. Some examples of how I plan to do this is providing notes and visual
examples in my lessons to help students who are visual learners, using classroom discussions,
lectures, and student presentations for students who learn best audibly, and assigning my students
to perform a scene from the novel or play we are reading to reach kinesthetic learners. I want my
students to all feel that they are considered and important in my classroom.
I plan on being a patient, empathic, open-minded, and understanding teacher who is
constantly furthering my knowledge both pedagogically and in the subject that I teach. I will
always be finding ways to best reach and encourage my students as I finish get some student

teaching experience, earn my degree, hopefully volunteer to teach abroad in disadvantaged

communities, and return home to teach English at the high school level. I look forward to the day
I can finally call myself a licensed teacher.