Teaching is a beautiful, challenging profession with a broad range of students and an ever-increasing demand for accountability, an expanded curriculum, and testing. To tackle these challenges, a teacher must be effective, which requires a commitment to students, the creation of a caring classroom, effective communication skills, ongoing reflection, flexibility, and collaboration with people in the teaching field.

My teaching philosophy focuses on creating an open and inviting learning environment, allowing students to realize their academic potential with appropriate guidance and take more responsibility for their learning. In doing so, I create a caring classroom: sensitive to students from different (cultural) backgrounds, value the opportunity to share diversity, make students feel welcomed, respected, and celebrated; I uphold the understanding that students are individuals capable of becoming lifelong learners. Once they know that they are valued as unique, capable human beings in a shared atmosphere of respect and belonging, they can take risks necessary for academic and personal growth. After realizing that they can be successful, they can make tremendous improvements and become achievers. Thus, embracing diverse ideas and using multiple perspectives in the classroom help create such an atmosphere.

Adapting the constructivists' ideas, I share the responsibility for learning with the students while focusing on their needs. It enables me to understand, discover their particular learning styles and present a better lesson. By incorporating the ideas from research on learning styles and multiple intelligences, I can adapt the curriculum to the strength of diverse students. I use a blend of teaching methods to implement such ideas, such as hands-on activities, verbal explanations, discussion groups, demonstrations, learning centers, and peer tutoring. I also use student portfolios and a variety of assessment formats to individualize student work. As learning takes place mainly within a social context, students learn more by active participation than by listening; by balancing cooperative learning groups and hands-on activities with guided instructions, and from time to time, appropriate encouragements, including praise, success experiences, clear expectations, learning games, token economies, and goal setting.

Further, I believe that all students should be expected to work hard and demonstrate a sense of seriousness and strong engagement in their endeavors. The attitude lays the foundation for a new mindset that proves that their success lies in their persistence, resilience, and expansive exercise of intellect, as it is the students combining the love for learning with the ability to adapt and reinvent themselves that experience success.

To become a good educator, I teach and learn. Teaching is a challenge and a joy, a lifelong process of reflecting and making necessary adjustments. I appreciate the uniqueness of every day and every student in an open and inviting learning community. I am grateful for the opportunity to be a part of students' lives as they grow physically, intellectually, and socially; it is a great joy to impact the students' lives in these ways.