Colin Spencely

TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

I firmly believe that my purpose as an educator is to provide a safe inclusive environment conducive to guiding students towards the ultimate goal of being able to learn for themselves. To achieve this goal, I believe in a pedagogy based in constructivism and project-based learning where students construct their own learning and show evidence of understanding by producing artifacts. Being a computer science educator, the artifacts we would produce would frequently be digital, but this does not make those artifacts any less tangible.

I also know that an educator's role does not stop at teaching the curriculum and assessing understanding. A huge part of an educator's job is to provide an example for students to follow. I wouldn't expect all of my students to become software developers or computer engineers, but I would expect that those students would observe me modelling compassion, empathy, and kindness and that they would take aspects of these qualities into themselves. Teachers need to help students to become productive and thoughtful humans and this is accomplished by showing those students what productive thoughtful humans look like.

My role as an educator also REQUIRES me to be a lifelong student myself! Apart from keeping current on education research and the everchanging field of computer science, I also need to live in each moment and be open to the lessons I can learn from every person I meet in life. Every lesson may not spout from a positive fount, but someone who leaves themselves open and vulnerable can take positive learning away from even the most negative of experiences.

At the beginning of this journey, I was strongly focused on translating my subject matter expertise into a format that students could grasp and transmitting that information as efficiently as possible. As I spent more and more time working with kids and taking courses, I started clueing into the bigger picture of teaching. Yes, covering the curriculum and collecting evidence of understanding is important, but these aspects of teaching are not any more important than forging positive relationships with students and providing those students with positive adult role models. Now as I near the end of my degree (but not of my journey!), I find myself leaning more and more into putting more and more positive "medicine" out into the world in the hopes that that positivity will spread and flourish.