I don’t remember not being able to read, not having a book in my hands or somewhere nearby. I was lucky to have a mother who read to me, taught me to read, and made the bookmobile a regular visit. I read anything I could get my hands on: newspapers, old encyclopedias, comic books, whatever I could find for a nickel at rummage sales. Even cereal boxes were worth my time. A book was a world to me, and another hunger grew alongside the reading: the need to know new things. At some point in early adulthood, I was struck by the realization that my love of reading had made me a self-learner—it was the key to the joys I have spent my life cultivating. How could I not want to share this love of language, of literature, of control over my own intake of knowledge?
My role as an educator is not to manufacture successful students but to mentor young people in becoming their own teachers, autodidacts who carry with them the tools and the hunger to keep learning long after they leave my classroom. Those tools, as I see them, are literature as a gateway to expanded worlds, curiosity as a lifelong remedy for boredom, the rigor and integrity expected of emerging adults, and membership in a classroom community where safety, inclusion, and mutual respect make it possible for all of us to learn from one another.
The metaphor I use most frequently to describe my philosophy is one of apprenticeship, not assembly. I grew up in schools where students were treated as raw material to be processed into workforce-ready products. I cannot but reject that framing. I think of my classroom as a workshop, where my students are apprentice craftsmen learning the craft of learning itself. For this endeavor to succeed, the quality I must hold most important is not that of innate ability but of perseverance: the willingness to struggle with a difficult text, to revise a rough draft, to sit with confusion long enough for understanding to take hold.
Zaretta Hammond (2015) makes a critical distinction between dependent and independent learners, in which she argues that our goal must be to build students’ intellective capacity: their ability to process complex information and perform rigorous cognitive tasks on their own. She writes that culturally responsive teaching “is also about empowerment and interrupting teaching practices that keep certain students dependent learners” (Hammond, 2015, p. 49). This resonates deeply with my vision of student as autodidact. I do not wish students to be dependent on me as their source of knowledge; instead, I am trying to make myself redundant. When a student learns to ask their own questions, locate their own sources, and evaluate their own understanding, they have gained something far more valuable and long-lasting than any content I could deliver through a lecture or assignment.
During my student teaching, I have seen students who are considered to be on a lower rung, at least academically, show great perseverance in areas that matter to them. They troubleshoot technology, they navigate complex social situations, and they master the lyrics and meanings of songs in multiple languages. The teacher's challenge is not to create perseverance where none exists but to help students transfer the grit they already have into academic contexts. As Hammond (2015) cautions, students have difficulty “not because of their race, language, or poverty” but because “we don’t offer them sufficient opportunities in the classroom to develop the cognitive skills and habits of mind that would prepare them to take on more advanced academic tasks” (p. 14). My job is to offer those opportunities, thoughtfully but relentlessly, and to do so while respectfully holding my students to high expectations, thereby leading them to have that same respect for themselves and their peers.
Every student who walks into my classroom arrives with what I think of as a textual lineage. This is the amalgam of stories, songs, movies and TV shows, books, memes, family narratives, and cultural texts that have already shaped how they see the world. Some of these are literary in the traditional sense; many are not. All of them matter. My work is to honor each student's lineage and extend it, to introduce students to texts that open doors they did not know existed.
This belief is grounded in both my personal experience and the research I have encountered in the HTH GSE program. Bransford et al. (2000) state that “if students’ initial ideas and beliefs are ignored, the understandings that they develop can be very different from what the teacher intends” (p. 10). In an English Language Arts classroom, this means that I cannot simply hand students a novel and expect them to engage with it; these interactions must be done, not within a vacuum, but from both a personal and a cultural frame of reference. I must first understand what they already know, what stories have already shaped them, and how those prior texts create both entry points and potential misconceptions. The constructivist framework that Windschitl (1999) describes, in which learners “actively create, interpret, and reorganize knowledge in individual ways” as they reconcile new content with existing understanding, is the theoretical foundation for why textual lineage matters so much in my classroom.
In my 9th grade ethnic studies classroom, this takes a specific shape. When we read texts like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower or Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I am not simply teaching literary analysis. I am asking students to see how narratives of race, of food systems, and of power shape their lived experience. Literature becomes a tool for reading the world, not just for reading the page. Hammond (2015) argues that culture functions as the brain’s “software,” the operating system through which all new information is processed. When I connect a text to a student's cultural knowledge and lived experience, I am working with the brain’s architecture, not against it.
I believe that boredom is self-created, or more precisely, that it is curable through curiosity. Furthermore, I believe that curiosity can, paradoxically, be fed by boredom. This is not a dismissal of students who seem disengaged; it is a challenge to me as their teacher. If a student is bored, I have not yet found the right question, the right provocation, the right connection between the content and something that matters to them. Also, I may have to model for them how to look at the world, and the mundane things in it. Take, as an example of a curiosity lesson, a pencil: "Assuming that manufacturers know that people will chew on them, what do they paint them with? Have they ever been painted with dangerous paint? What is the eraser made of? How was it invented? What does it smell like if you burn it?" Boredom forces us to find interest in the mundane, and once that habit is in place, curiosity will become a constant companion and mentor.
Jensen and McConchie (2020) identify three hardwired motivations in the brain: curiosity, anticipation, and behavioral relevance. These are not niceties to be attempted only once “the basics” have been covered; they are the neurological requirements for learning to happen at all. A lesson that ignores these motivations is like building, as I noted in one of the many iterations of my Teaching Philosophy Graphic Organizer, a tower of plain wooden blocks, unstable and forgettable. A lesson that activates prior knowledge, ignites curiosity, and connects to students’ sense of what matters, however, is like building with interlocking bricks: each piece holds the next in place.
This is why I have come to value backward design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) not only as a planning framework but also as a philosophical commitment. When I begin the creation of a lesson with a clear idea of what I want students to attain, and only then design the inspirations, questions, and activities that will get them there, I am centering their cognitive journey rather than my content delivery. Ritchhart et al. (2011) describe this shift: when the learner is placed “at the hub of the educational enterprise,” the teacher’s role moves from delivering information to “fostering students’ engagement with ideas” (p. 26). In practice, this means I design lessons that launch with interest (if not outright wonder), using perhaps an image, a question, or a contradiction, and then give students the time and scaffolding to investigate. The goal is not to entertain but to set alight the kind of curiosity that outlasts the class period.
None of the above is possible without a classroom community that has at its core safety, inclusion, and mutual respect. Intellectual risk-taking, which is seen in the willingness to offer a half-formed idea, to disagree with a peer, or to admit confusion, requires trust. And trust, as Hammond (2015) explains, is neurological as well as relational. When students feel marginalized or unsafe, the amygdala initiates a threat response that effectively shuts down the higher-order thinking that teachers should be trying to cultivate. Positive relationships, on the other hand, trigger oxytocin and allow the prefrontal cortex to do its work. The warm, demanding classroom I hope to build is not just a comfortable environment; it is a neurological necessity.
Our coursework on classroom culture dealt, in part, with helping students feel safe. In this area, I was drawn to restorative approaches to conflict or discord. Charney (2002) argues that logical consequences “help to restore self-control and self-respect through actions, not just words” (p. 152). Despite not having seen this approach modeled much at all, it resonated with me because it treats students as capable moral beings, not as problems to be managed. When a student makes a poor choice, the question is not “How do I punish this?” but “How does this student make it right?” This is my teacher-as-craftsman model applied to character: I am teaching students to repair what they break, much more than to fear the consequences of breaking it.
Community also means that I approach my classroom as a space where everyone has something to teach. bell hooks (1994) writes that in a true classroom community, the capacity to generate excitement “is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence” (p. 8). I heard this philosophy mentioned in my early adulthood, during a dharma talk, in which the monk said that there is no person on earth from whom nothing can be learned. I learn from my students every day about their cultures, their narratives, their ways of making meaning, and I try to create structures that allow them to learn from each other. Group work, Socratic discussion, peer feedback: these are not just instructional strategies. They are expressions of a belief that knowledge is socially constructed and that the most powerful learning happens in common.
I currently teach in San Diego, in an ethnic studies–focused program, and I take that context seriously. Hammond (2015) writes that “every culturally responsive teacher develops a sociopolitical consciousness, an understanding that we live in a racialized society that gives unearned privilege to some while others experience unearned disadvantage because of race, gender, class, or language” (p. 18). I am still developing that consciousness and continue to learn how my own privileges, as a white woman, as an educated adult, and as someone whose textual lineage was validated rather than erased by school, influence the way I see the world and shape the way that I teach.
This is not a confession offered for absolution; it is a commitment to ongoing and enthusiastic work. Antiracist teaching, as Jewell (2020) defines it, means actively resisting unjust structures, not simply refraining from overt prejudice. In my classroom, this translates to curricula choices that center historically marginalized voices, to practices that affirm students’ cultural identities rather than requiring them to assimilate, and to a willingness to let students question the status quo (including my own assumptions) when they find it lacking. Ladson-Billings (2006) reminds us that the education debt owed to communities of color is cumulative and structural, as the product of centuries of underinvestment. I cannot repay that debt alone, but I can refuse to add to it by holding every student to high standards while providing the culturally responsive support that makes those standards reachable.
Teaching, I am learning, is a juggling act: being fully present to one student while tracking thirty; holding firm standards while meeting each learner where they are; planning meticulously while remaining flexible enough to detour from the lesson plan in following a passionate question from a student. I am a teacher, and this means that I am also a facilitator, a mentor, a mediator, and most importantly, a lifelong learner. The same belief that led me to the bookmobile as a child now leads me into my classroom each morning: the conviction that there is always more to know, and that the knowing is better when it is shared.
I do not yet have all the answers and hopefully never will. I hope to always be building my craft, and, as the first line of Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls reads, "[t]he lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne" (Phillips & Havely, 2016, p. 233). But I know what I am building toward: a classroom where students become their own teachers, where literature opens doors, where curiosity is the norm, where rigor is an act of respect, and where every person in the room, including me, has something to learn.
Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. National Academy Press.
Charney, R. (2002). Teaching children to care: Classroom management for ethical and academic growth, K–8. Northeast Foundation for Children.
Hammond, Z. (2015). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Corwin.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.
Jensen, E., & McConchie, L. (2020). Brain-based learning: Teaching the way students really learn (3rd ed.). Corwin.
Jewell, T. (2020). This book is anti-racist: 20 lessons on how to wake up, take action, and do the work. Quarto Publishing Group.
Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). From the achievement gap to the education debt: Understanding achievement in U.S. schools. Educational Researcher, 35(7), 3–12. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X035007003
Phillips, H., & Havely, N. (2016). Chaucer’s Dream Poetry. Routledge.
Ritchhart, R., Church, M., & Morrison, K. (2011). Making thinking visible: How to promote engagement, understanding, and independence for all learners. Jossey-Bass.
Wiggins, G. P., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). Pearson/Merrill Prentice Hall.
Windschitl, M. (1999). The challenges of sustaining a constructivist classroom culture. Phi Delta Kappan, 80(10), 751–755.