My personal experience as an educator is limited, but I’m an excellent learner. I’ve always loved to learn. I read the dictionary and encyclopedia for fun as a child, and to this day, I’m like a kid in a toy store when I encounter anything I know nothing about–it becomes something new to learn!
My teaching philosophy: learning together
I think the best way to engage a student is to reverse the roles and turn him or her into a teacher. It follows that a teacher walks into a classroom also ready to be a student. It becomes an occasion of learning together.
The best teachers are not necessarily knowledge experts but expert facilitators of learning.
Teaching Teens
I didn’t study to be a teacher, but teaching seems to be an underlying motif that pops up in my life again and again.
My very first teaching experience was as a substitute teacher for Christian Living in my old high school, St. Pedro Poveda College. A teacher was going on maternity leave and they were hard-pressed for a temp. At that time I was an idealistic fresh college graduate, ready to conquer the world. I had my license as a real estate broker, was actively selling insurance and mutual funds, and thought why not–I could teach teenagers for a few months.
I didn’t know anything about lesson planning, so I taught it the way I would’ve liked to learn it: personal, relatable and simple. We talked about the Old Testament and approached it as Literature: we were telling each other stories. I made the girls talk about themselves a lot, and created a space where dialogue was welcome. At the end of my 2-month stay, my students prepared a send off and one girl stood up and said, “Thank you, Ms. Jo, for making me dream again.” That was a precious thank you that I still carry with me to this day.
Over time I would go on to teach High School Spanish for two years and English as a foreign language to kids in a summer camp in Spain.
One key advice I got early on: just love them. Love your students.
The other key advice I got: when you’re asked a question you can’t answer, just throw the question back and ask, “What do you think?” This was especially useful when we tackled difficult topics like God being vengeful, but it also dispelled the idea of teacher as guru. It’s okay not to have the answers.
Teaching Kids
I’m not a parent, but I’m a big fan of natural schools and methods that nurture a child’s sense of wonder and reverence for the world.
In 2014, my family took over operations of a private preschool in a prime business district in Manila and I was asked to help out. Together with natural school mentors, I introduced a nursery program with a natural schooling approach and saw firsthand the difference it made to the kids and parents.
We started monthly dialogues for nannies or yayas and another one for parents, and built a culture of cooperation and openness in our school. We made it clear to everyone that we were all partners in educating the children.
Key takeaways from this experience:
- There is a lot of room for scaling this natural approach to education in the Philippines, especially in the daycare/preschool years.
- Lots of work to be done in convincing Filipinos on the merits of play-based learning
- Introducing creative living to families is critical when kids are very young. Not only are these the foundation years for the child, but these are also the foundation years for the parents, who are usually still learning how to parent. Most parents at this stage are still very involved in the nitty gritty of their child’s education.
Teaching Adults
If I were to embrace teaching as a vocation, I’d choose adults as my students.
I think it’s with adults that one can freely and fully apply the philosophy of learning together.
It is being comfortable with not (yet) knowing. The goal is still very much to learn, but it’s okay to proceed without having all the answers.
Anyone in a leadership role can benefit from seeing himself/herself as a teacher-mentor. I had a chance to test this out for myself when I led my small team of teachers and staff at the preschool for two years.
Year one was chaos, so we started year two with a different tactic. We spent time building a space of trust and collaboration by focusing our teacher training on biography work and getting to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. This opened the door for honest and transparent communication, which set the tone for our working relationship. The preschool became a center of learning not just for the kids, but also for the adults that ran it.
Takeaways:
- Encourage healthy dissent. As co-learners, each one has something to contribute and I appreciated it when my teachers would disagree with me.
- Give each other feedback as often as needed.
- Make sure every voice is heard.
- Step out of the way.
Teaching the Teacher
Having worked independently most of my life, I’ve never had to answer to a boss, but I’ve also never had a mentor.
In 2015, I took some units in Education as part of a Program in Education as Transformational Leadership at the Asian Social Institute in Malate, Manila. Here are my takeaways from dialogues we had on alternative education and how it applies to building creative communities:
- A creative community as a learning tool itself, that will shape and support mental, financial, psychological, and spiritual growth of people living in it and passing through.
- The whole community becomes the learning space.
- The adults will be busy doing their own creative tinkering—whether as professionals, entrepreneurs, techno geeks, artists, architects, etc.—and at the same time, just by being living examples, they are already manifesting the desired learning outcomes for the children.
- Adults also need to learn how to be artists again, to trust intuition and allow an atmosphere of creativity to come alive in the community.