According to my tutoring and teaching experience, I believe the core of my teaching philosophy is guiding student to seek for truths on their own. There is an old saying in China. That is, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; but if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. To achieve this goal, as teachers, we need to explore students’ needs by facilitating effective communications with them to motivate and encourage students to study to achieve their goals.

Explore the Needs of Students – Effective Communication

         The most key element of teaching is to meet the students’ needs. For many students in China, they often feel that there is a distance between teachers and students since they seldom have good communications between each other. Thus, it is important for teachers and students to achieve an effective communication. For teachers, we should bring up interesting topics, as well as share our previous learning experience to the students, which can make students feel closer to their teachers. As well, teachers should give students more space and more freedom to speak out their thoughts and needs. No matter what students have said, teachers need to show their respects and encourage students to share more. By communicating with students effectively, teachers are able to know the needs of students and help students accordingly.

Motivate Students to Study

          Another key element in my teaching philosophy is stimulating students’ motivations to study. From my tutoring and teaching experience, I have found that sometimes when students are interested in some topics, they have strong motivations, for example, they are more likely to ask questions and answer questions. In these cases, students are able to learn more with their interests. For teachers, we need to find various ways to motivate students to study not only in class but also outside the classroom. For instance, teachers can provide students with support by teaching themselves how to use those available resources, so that students can learn by themselves after class. Thus, as long as students have motivations to study, they can keep learning many things when teachers are not by their side.

          To sum up, I aim to teach and motivate students to study and seek answers on their own. I hope that students in my class are not only learning what I have taught them, but also learning what they have found by doing researches themselves, which can benefit their future study.