My teaching philosophy, though still in it’s infancy, is multifaceted. As I am sure most are. Not only do I want my students to know I’ll always try to be in their corner, I strive to strip education from the traditional ways and help push it towards the new exploratory world that it can be. The learning should be student-centric, should help the student learn more about themselves than about the prescribed curriculum. This means reshaping the expectations of parents, of other educational institutions, and it’s not guaranteed to be possible. I have discussed this notion with other educators, and to achieve this ideal classroom would mean breaking down the education system as a whole, which we can’t do from the inside. So we will have to work with the inquiry-based schools, like Norma Rose Point School on UBC campus, or the Inquiry Hub in Coquitlam. In these institutes, there is a new way to look at education that is far more encouraging for self-exploration and creativity – it’s all very holistic. They, like myself, believe in a classroom that values inquiry over answers, values the process over the product. Learning should be facilitated, not taught. The role of a teacher, in my ideal classroom, is as a mentor more than a lecturer. It has been quoted before in various sources, but a large part of my teaching philosophy is based on the idea that education is not about the mastery of academia, but the mastery of personal development. Education should have a level of autonomy to it – let the students lead the discussions, let them discover the world the way we did thousands of years ago before the rules and regulations of institutional learning befell us.

In an ideal world, the current education system would be dismantled and rebuilt around the re-emerging notions of inquiry-based, self-regulated education where the classes and projects are student-designed and -led. Unfortunately, we do not live in this ideal world yet. We do, however, have the ability to create our own classroom environment.