My Personal Statement of Education

“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” - William Butler Yeats


I personally believe that education is about empowerment. That is, bringing back the child to oneself. The task of the teacher is to facilitate the blossoming of a child and to help the child realize that he/she has all the potentials within.


As a teacher, I try to strike a balance between my teaching styles and my students’ learning styles. The awareness of both, I feel, is a powerful tool to allow education to happen. In this way, the teacher unfolds with the students.


I have chosen education as a path towards my self-realization. I bring myself to the classroom. This challenges me to work on my own mastery of myself. I find myself “becoming” as I teach, that is, I find myself in my natural state. I find myself fortunate to be doing something that I can be myself in. I can only share and inspire my love for learning through teaching. This is reflected in my openness to accept challenges in teaching different grade levels (kindergarten, to elementary, to middle school, to high school and to college) and different subjects all these years.


I believe that education is not yet education until it educates the whole person. This is what attracted me to the IB program. There is the striving to work on every IB Learner profile as much as possible and more. In my classes, it is my aim to achieve developing cognitive, affective and psychomotor development. Bloom’s taxonomy and the IB command terms guide me in developing the cognitive aspect in my classes. KAGAN cooperative learning strategies and the MYP Areas of Interaction help me in achieving the affective and the psychomotor aspects of learning. I personally feel, that at the end of the class or the quarter, reflecting on learning is as or more important as the process of acquiring knowledge.



They say that when the student is ready, the master appears. I believe that when the student is ready, the teacher disappears. My goal as a teacher is to develop independent and interdependent learning skills in my students, that one day they may no longer need me as a teacher but enjoy my presence as a member of the interdependent team of learners.


Signed:

Mataji Tolentino Villareal-Sharma

Kodaikanal International School, India

25 October 2008