One thing I have learned over the past few semesters is that there are many ways for people to learn. We have gone over many theories and ideas about the so called best way to teach. From all of the lessons and readings we have read  about this subject, I have formulated my very own teaching philosophy.

Learning is a great thing, it stimulates the brain and when you give the brain information, all it wants is more. Unfortunately learning only happens when the person is engaged in the subject matter. Learning happens even more rapidly when one feeds their own brain with the information as oppose to having someone feed it to you. So what if you could trick people into teaching themselves. Maybe trick is a harsh word, guide, lead, steer are better choices.

 Guiding people to teaching their ownselves. This is what my teaching philosophy is all about. This dawned on me on my solo experience. I recalled all the times when I have really remembered information. I was trying to remember some names of plants around my sleeping bag. I soon realized that I was able to remember much more then I thought. It felt like information was flowing out of my head.  I had never really felt an experience like that before. It made me ask myself, why was I remembering this information so well.

I realized that it was all the information that I was ready and willing to engage my brain in learning. The key word there being learning. When I taught myself about plants I felt like I learned the information instead of memorizing it. It is an easy concept to grasp, it’s just hard to apply. I thought to myself “ how could you help people teach themselves?” Thinking about this idea I realized that it was a very easy thing to apply this guided self teaching. I find that it is all about asking questions. If a student that you are leading comes up to you with a question and you start asking them questions, the student soon realizes that they can figure it out on their own. I have seen people do this before. My outward bound instructors applied tactics in the course that I was a part of. I did not realize at the time but that course with outward bound really got this self teaching idea churning in my brain.

I have seen it in myself and in lots of my friends that are in the Adventure Education program. When we start to teach ourselves about the wilderness, we all enjoy it and we all want more of it. I have seen the long term change of being subject to this kind of self teaching philosophy and I have seen the success it has. It is this philosophy I choose to base most of my teachings in my future career.