On Teaching

Today I am drafting yet another teaching philosophy statement. I’ve written this statement before—at least three or four times. But with each new subject and each new teaching experience, my philosophy changes. As I grow as a teacher, the philosophy changes. Since I wrote the last philosophy statement, I’ve taught college history, middle school writing, adult writing workshops, yoga classes, and sermons—and that’s just in the past year.

My teaching world is now much wider than the high school English classroom, and I want a philosophy that sums it all up—is that possible? It should be. There’s a basic underlying structure of the philosophy that is then altered to fit the subject matter. For example, the philosophy of teaching might be the same for the writing workshop and the yoga studio, but the pedagogy will be different.

Take my most recent teaching challenge: yoga classes.

This fall, I started teaching a Level I/II Flow yoga class once a week. At first, I designed my class around my assumption of what a Level I/II class should look like—based on my experience in other classes. There were two problems with this: 1) that assumption did not fit how I was naturally teaching and I was uncomfortable; 2) the people walking into the class were more comfortable with Level I. So I could plan a beautiful Level I/II class and need to radically alter it on the fly. If that’s the case—then why plan?

There are three basic elements to a classroom: the subject, the students, and the teacher. The teacher communicates the subject to the students. In a yoga studio, the teacher invites the students to experience the subject, which is another way of communicating. Yoga instructors teach out of their experience with the subject. Each yoga instructor teaches differently.

How I teach yoga is fundamentally changing how I teach writing. How can I teach writing out of my own experience? How can I facilitate an environment where students experience writing? Where they are inspired to take their writing (and their yoga) out of the classroom and into their lives?

At its core, teaching philosophy wrestles with the triangle of relationship between subject, student, and teacher. (I drew a funny diagram, but can’t get the scanner to like my computer.) There are different ways of weighting this triangle—subject-heavy, student-centered, or teacher-oriented (what I call the dictator-method).

I’m beginning to think of this triangle as an oval. Unlike the circle, which has one focal point, the oval (the subject matter) has two foci (the student and the teacher). The subject matter really is bigger than either the student or the teacher. In theory, the teacher has studied the subject matter longer and deeper than the student; the teacher hopefully has a broad experience with and knowledge of the subject. Thus, the teacher guides and facilitates the student’s experience, knowledge, and understanding of the subject. This guiding and facilitating is based on the teacher’s knowledge of the student.

A good yoga instructor doesn’t ask a beginning student to do a headstand. A good writing instructor doesn’t ask a beginning student to be Hemingway (but who would want to be Hemingway?). A good instructor teaches the student how to enjoy the subject.

I could write all day on this. Good thing I don’t need to solidify a final draft of this teaching philosophy for another year.


I googled a few professors I know to find their philosophies. Check out this essay by Jack Ridl, a retired Holland (MI) poet & professor. It's about grading--which I didn't yet tackle in this exploration. I prefer the staircase method: throw the pile of essays down the stairs--the essays on the top steps receive As, the next steps Bs, the next steps Cs, and so on.