Learning Environment Paper

Name: Erin Quinty

General Introduction
Throughout my teaching career I expect to learn many valuable things about my teaching, myself
as an educator, and the students that I will be teaching. Among those are a set of beliefs that will
help guide my teaching and allow me to become a highly skilled educator.
Three Beliefs
Currently I have many beliefs about education, but this paper will focus on three of my most
highly prized beliefs as listed below:
There is no specific formula for learning, each student is unique in the way he/she learns.
Teaching is both implicit and explicit.
A flourishing learning environment only comes with mutual respect between the student
and the teacher.
Rationale and Personal Experiences
One of my strongest beliefs about teaching is that there is no specific formula for
learning, each student is unique in the way he or she learns. I believe this is something that all
teachers need to recognize. In addition, all students need to be aware that not everybody learns
the same way. In this day and age a large portion of our teachers are being pushed to use
curriculum lesson books in which their lessons are scripted to a t. When a teacher utilizes
lesson books so closely, they are assuming each child learns the same way. If a teacher is setting
the students up to learn the exact same way, then the teacher is also implicitly informing the
students that if they do not learn through the narrow minded ways of the curriculum book, then
he/she is unintelligent or incapable of learning. I hope my students will be aware that there are
infinite ways to learn and that if they do not understand something the first time, they should not
give up.
I largely took upon this mindset after reading some of the works of Sir Ken Robinson.
Robinson describes how students are not something you can manufacture on an assembly line.
Each child has different talents, minds, and ways of learning. It is a teachers job to tap into that
and create a confident, engaged, and hard working student. I personally have experienced
narrow-minded teachers, especially through my transition from catholic school to public school.
In catholic school, I was taught one specific way to multiply two digit numbers. When I got to
public school I was presented with multiple options of how to solve the multiplication problem.
While I personally enjoyed the traditional way of multiplying, I loved having the option to solve
a problem in multiple ways. I had this option because my teacher realized each student did not
learn in the same way. What works for one student may not work for another student.
I also believe that teaching is both implicit and explicit. This idea mostly stems from the
social learning theory of education. This is the idea that learning is a social experience. People
learn from direct explicit instruction, but a large part of learning is through observation,

modeling, and peer interaction. I believe role models play a large role in a childs life. As a
teacher, everything I say and do will be watched by 20+ eager eyes. Because of this, it is
important that I think through everything I say and do before I do it. For example, if I
consistently speak to boys and girls in a different tone of voice or about different topics, I could
be implicitly teaching the students to fall into gender stereotypes. This implicit learning is also a
factor in my regular everyday discussions. It is important that I remind myself to keep opinions
out of my instruction as I will aim to present information to my students in an unbiased fashion.
I have seen implicit learning through my personal experiences as a student. In my high
school gym courses I had a male teacher who created a gender gap in the classroom. He always
spoke to the girls in a higher tone and would let us have options when it came to activities. We
could play the game with the boys or we could walk around the track. When it came to the boys,
the teacher was very strict. He spoke to them with a stern tone and required that they participate
in each activity. By speaking to females and males so differently, the teacher implicitly taught us
that girls and boys are different. This changed our viewpoints for many things when it came to
discussions about gender roles and equality. I will ensure that my classroom is free of any
negative stereotypes or role models.
My final belief is that students and teachers must have mutual respect in order to create a
positive, effective learning environment. I aim to hold my students to the highest standards.
When students feel like they are being respected and being treated as adults then they will be
more likely to work harder to meet this standard. By treating my students like adults and not
children, they will be able to respect me. Hopefully this mutual respect will eradicate any future
conflicts within the classroom. If we both respect each other then perhaps behavior issues would
be less common, as students and teachers would be able to resolve conflict through mature
discussions.
I feel as if the best learning experiences for me occurred when there was mutual respect
between me and my teacher. I first remember feeling respected as a student in my third grade
classroom. My teacher was an older woman who was very traditional in her teaching styles. She
focused on discussion in the classroom and had goals to teach us how to reason with one another.
Her tone of voice was always mature; she never spoke to us like we were children. My teacher
was approachable, but never a push-over. The mature ways in which she communicated with us
made us rise to her high standards. She respected our ideas, opinions, and work, always making
each one of us feel as if we were a vital piece to the classroom.