A Personal Philosophy of Teaching

Obviously, as a parent, I have taught my son, Jerome, more than one thing in the last 16 years. But, when I think of teaching and the philosophy of teaching, the example of teaching him to play the guitar always stands out. Not only was it a lot of fun but, when I look back at the process through the lens of a “teaching philosophy”, I realize that, whether or not I knew educational theory:

• I endeavoured to make learning engaging and instill a love of lifelong learning.
• I tailored the teaching approach depending on what I wanted him to learn -using Liberal, behaviourist, and humanist philosophies among others.
• I was acutely aware of his “zone of proximal development.”
• I measured success in a formative context (and he has been successful!)

I believe that this experience more than any other, encompasses the entirety of my teaching philosophy.

In addition to being a cornerstone of liberal education, (Sullivan, 2019, p. 145) lifelong learning is both a personal and professional value for me. I strongly believe that education can improve people’s lives and society. In the example of teaching Jerome to play the guitar, I can see the pleasure that he derives from learning every day. I know that he has learned the value of ongoing learning and that his learning will continue for a lifetime because he seeks out and masters new music now without direction from me and faster than I can keep up.

In my professional teaching lifelong learning is vitally important. Medicine is a fast-changing field and those practitioners who aren’t continually learning are quickly left behind. This doesn’t just make their jobs unpleasant and stressful but can also be dangerous if it leads to inappropriate patient care. As technology evolves the field of technical rescue is also rapidly developing and failure to continuously learn can quickly cause system failures that lead to the injury or death of the rescuer and the patient.

All of this leads me to the obvious question: How have I promoted lifelong learning in the past and how will I continue to incorporate it in my teaching?

To begin with, I tell my students that the profession that they are entering is a teaching and learning profession. They should expect that school is only the entry-level learning and that if they wish to excel at their vocation, they will need to keep learning and asking questions throughout their career. However, I recognize that the efficacy of making such a statement to a classroom full of eager and distracted young students is questionable. So, beyond that there are a few other things that I do that I believe promote continuous learning.

I repeatedly require students to set learning goals. Importantly, these are self-directed goals. I think that this helps engage students in the process and nurtures their curiosity. I ask, never tell, Jerome what songs he is learning next. He always has a goal in mind and sometimes it’s not just another song: he has recently taken up slide guitar and is looking for a bass as well.

I try to make learning time “playtime”.

In this, I draw on my experience as a runner and know that it is always the last mile that you remember. If the last mile went well, it is much easier to get going again the next day. Often, in order to break up lectures or at the end of a busy day, I like to use group competitions or have groups research a subject and do presentations with the best presentation being selected by their peers. I rarely use anything elaborate. It just needs to be something that turns learning into a social activity or a game. This is easier with some subjects than others (there is a reason that they call it “playing the guitar”) turning pathophysiology, for example, into playtime can take a bit of effort.

Finally, I try as often as I can to let the students act as the teacher. I feel that there is more than one benefit to this. The element of social interaction enhances the appeal of the learning process for students who are extroverts, and it drives the introverts to engage deeply with the material as they tend to like to be prepared. Having the student become the teacher often results in what is essentially a liberal Socratic dialogue. This effect is further enhanced by capitalizing on the progressivist advantage of diminishing the hierarchy between the students and their new “teacher”. I find that these activities often result in more productive conversation and engagement than a lecture from me alone.

If I want my technical rescue students to learn a psychomotor skill such as tying knots, there is little room for concerns of creativity or social justice. I simply need them to tie the same knot in the same way proficiently and correctly every single time. For this, I rely on the “drill and practice” of the behaviouralist approach.

Much of what I like to teach lies in the affective domain. I think that this has been undervalued and under-taught for decades in medicine. It is easy in the healthcare professions for practitioners to become “jaded” and treat people differently after five or ten years of practise than they would have as new graduates. It is easy for practitioners to dehumanize the “frequent fliers”, misunderstand people suffering from addiction and fail to recognize patients who complain of something innocuous or even ridiculous when what they actually need is mental health support but don’t know how to ask. This falls, largely into the realm of a “critical” teaching approach and, to some extent, into the holistic teaching approach of Humanism. I ask students to share how they understand these issues at the beginning of their careers and try to imagine how the stresses of their work might affect their beliefs and actions in the future. This invariably leads to a critical discussion of their current mindset as they seek to articulate, defend and reshape their current ideas. My hope is that it also prepares them to protect their values in years ahead and continue to act in accordance with them.

Proximal Development and Scaffolding

Proximal development and scaffolding are also concepts that I have employed in the past before understanding what they are and how they work. They are concepts that will continue to be an important part of my approach to teaching. When teaching Jerome to play guitar, I did not expect him to play an Eric Clapton solo the first time he picked up a guitar. Instead, I taught him how to hold the guitar and showed him that it could be used to replicate the songs that he already knew and loved. Once he was holding the guitar, I could show him how to play a few chords and how the notes progress from one string to the next… and then I blinked, and he was playing Clapton actually!

In professional settings, I don’t expect students to simultaneously assess a patient, plan an extrication and intubate upside down in a snowbank. I trust that I will give them the tools and the confidence to do that one day, but it is vital to start with the individual building blocks through scaffolding and awareness of their individual zones of proximal development.

Teaching students how to assess a patient is a great example of this. First, they are taught the value of a good patient assessment. Then they review any relevant physiology so that they can see how it relates to their findings; they are taught how to physically perform assessments and then how to tailor assessments to different presentations. Finally, stressors are added in the form of challenging circumstances, ambiguous signals, or difficult decisions. Skipping any step or failing to support the progression from one step to the next appropriately can cause the student to be unsuccessful in the entire program because of the foundational character of this skill.

Measuring Success

Many of the programs that I teach are cumulative in nature, in the sense that they rely on mastery of a previous stage before progressing to subsequent stages. For this reason, measuring success, especially in a formative way, will always be part of my personal teaching philosophy.

While reading Jayne Bartlett’s (2015, p. 58) work on integrating assessment, I realized that I treat formative assessment as a vitally important component of “scaffolding”. This is because, I believe that it is critical to understand the student’s current position in order to define their zone of proximal development.

In professional settings, test scores are relied on for assessment to some degree. They are also required to show due diligence to regulatory bodies, defend decisions about student progress and for various purposes that may, or may not, relate to learning. Personally, I think that I value written exams more than some other educators might. I recognize that there are concerns with written exams in terms of language comprehension, bias, relevance to real world practise and others, but I feel that the challenges of exams are reflected in the reality of practise and that learning to deal with these challenges is a valuable skill in its own right. However, I do not rely entirely on exams. I pay close attention to other indicators of engagement, comprehension, and progress. I notice what time students arrive for class and I find that this is often a reasonably accurate proxy for their enthusiasm. I think that the students waxing and waning enthusiasm from one day to the next is probably a good approximation of their feelings about their own learning. I watch to see how actively they are engaging with other students and how much they contribute to group assignments. All of these factors help me to develop an overall picture of how the student is progressing so that I can give attention where it is needed and correct any barriers along the way.

As for Jerome and playing guitar, assessment is simply a recognition of the fact that he has surpassed the abilities of his instructor, directs his own learning now and is probably developing his own philosophy of teaching as he patiently encourages me to keep up!

References

Jayne, B. (2015). Using assessment to drive learning in the main body of the lesson. In Outstanding Assessment for Learning in the Classroom. Routledge.

Work adapted from: Donnelly, Trystan, (2023). A Personal Teaching Philosophy Statement [Unpublished manuscript]. University of Alberta.