Teaching Philosophy Statement
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Adam Febles
Florida International University
I admire teachers who engage their students, defy students’ expectations, and challenge their students to think outside their comfort zone. Instead of relying solely on lectures, these kinds of teachers create an environment in which the students work through and figure out solutions on their own. Because I have been a teaching assistant for both Linguistics and English Composition, I understand a variety of different ideas and approaches that are needed to engage students and their diverse learning styles.
In order to immerse my students in the topic at hand, to keep them motivated, I’ve employed several methods such as small group discussion, verbal reflection, rephrasal of each other’s ideas and progression to meaningful conclusions. I believe clear communication of goals and expectations should be stated as soon as possible and reiterated throughout the semester, but there are times when students feel lost in the classroom and they are not sure why they’re doing a certain activity. To counter this, I’ve used a weekly online entry in which the students give a 100-word response to why they think we conducted a particular activity or lesson. I then provide feedback for each individual student. From doing this, I’ve learned that students feel like their ideas and opinions matter because I give them individual attention and I gradually understand their respective identity. Also, they doing an engaging activity in which they’re free to critically think, assess and analyze their education without having the anxiety of working towards a specific letter grade for each response.
In Linguistics, students learned to think abstractly about the sentence structure of English and its hierarchy of constituents in relation to syntax. In writing and rhetoric, I teach students that writing is thinking. Because students have the power to edit their papers though revisions of thoughts, focus and supporting details, their writing can embody all the recursive and progressive processes of the mind. These notions can be directly applied to learning a foreign language. A student has the ability to edit and adapt in oral communication with a native speaker as soon as meaning is lost. If students look at their language skills locally, they will only focus on verb conjugations, pluralization or sentence agreement. When students think globally, holistically, perhaps about an abstract message they are trying to convey, it is in this moment that the language barrier begins to soften and communication begins. I’ve had students think globally through exercises that involve only using vocabulary to get across their message. Through this exercise, they realize the importance of meaning over grammar because they start to see the bigger picture of communication. In turn, their grammar gradually improves over time.
Peter Elbow, best known for his work in writing theory, practice and pedagogy has stated, “Meaning is not what you start out with but what you end up with.” For example, if a small group of students are given a picture of a famine child sitting by himself in front of a jungle, questions like how did this child get here and why, implore various interconnections of the aforementioned methods. I’ve seen through divergent thinking and debate of these dialogic points of view, students are pushed outside their comfort zone and are forced to think for themselves. This same exercise was conducted when I was a student of Japanese and it was shown to work quite effectively. To teach is to learn and I encourage my students to teach themselves, teach each other and to teach me.
