Teaching excites me because I relish learning new ideas, sharing my passion for literature and the written word,

and creating meaningful relationships with my students and peers. I believe that all people have the right to learn and to be challenged. As an educator, it is important to help teach my students how to think critically and act responsibly while providing a stimulating learning environment. By promoting active learning through authentic and relevant experiences, I believe I can guide and motivate students to be successful. While the 21st century learners in my classroom have multiple intelligences and diverse interests and learning goals, they can all direct their interests to yield high achievement. Building positive student-teacher relationships allows me to engage students in purposeful strategies that are relevant to each students particular learning goals. Benjamin Franklin once said: Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn. Involving my students interests and strengths into the standards-based curriculum helps me to differentiate lessons, texts, and assessments to maintain a high level of academic rigor for all of my students. For example, by using this knowledge of my students interests and levels of literacy, I formulate literature circles and book discussions by providing choices of texts that are developmentally appropriate while still being stimulating and challenging. I believe my passion for literature and language will inspire my students to share my enthusiasm for reading. I firmly believe that students learn empathy, perspective, and character by studying quality literature. Reading about the richness of history, culture, and the power of the human spirit impacts students in ways that teachers alone cannot. English Language Arts is an integral part of each childs education because it reinforces every other subject. Being able to effectively communicate ideas is essential to all professions and relationships. Creating innovative projects such as blogs, podcasts and multimedia projects excites students to share their ideas and to collaborate with others. As Paulo Freire states in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, it is important to read the word and the world by critically analyzing texts. Evaluating the intended messages of advertisements, commercials, speeches, and movies inspires students to be informed consumers and citizens. I plan on engaging my students with the world through active reading, writing, collaboration, discussion, and research. As a catalyst for educational change, I strive to grow by reflecting on my classroom and my students. As a life-long learner, I relish the opportunity to grow side by side with my students. By evaluating my teaching, and researching new teaching strategies, I continue to make well-informed instructional choices. I believe that teachers should not be alone in making these educational decisions, but that parents, families and communities need to work together to support and enrich the lives of their children. Parents and guardians are important members of the educational team and should thus be in constant communication with teachers. I believe my philosophy promotes me as a teacher who is devoted to improving society and educating one child at a time.