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40 Philosophy of Education Examples, Plus How To Write Your Own

Learn how to define and share your teaching philosophy.

These days, it’s become common for educators to be asked what their personal teaching philosophy is. Whether it’s for a job interview, a college class, or to share with your principal, crafting a philosophy of education can seem like a daunting task. So set aside some time to consider your own teaching philosophy (we’ll walk you through it), and be sure to look at philosophy of education examples from others (we’ve got those too!).

What is a philosophy of education?

Before we dive into the examples, it’s important to understand the purpose of a philosophy of education. This statement will provide an explanation of your teaching values and beliefs. Your teaching philosophy is ultimately a combination of the methods you studied in college and any professional experiences you’ve learned from since. It incorporates your own experiences (negative or positive) in education.

Many teachers have two versions of their teaching philosophy: a long form (a page or so of text) and a short form. The longer form is useful for job application cover letters or to include as part of your teacher portfolio. The short form distills the longer philosophy into a couple of succinct sentences that you can use to answer teacher job interview questions or even share with parents.

What’s the best teaching philosophy?

Here’s one key thing to remember: There’s no one right answer to “What’s your teaching philosophy?” Every teacher’s will be a little bit different, depending on their own teaching style, experiences, and expectations. And many teachers find that their philosophies change over time, as they learn and grow in their careers.

When someone asks for your philosophy of education, what they really want to know is that you’ve given thought to how you prepare lessons and interact with students in and out of the classroom. They’re interested in finding out what you expect from your students and from yourself, and how you’ll apply those expectations. And they want to hear examples of how you put your teaching philosophy into action.

What’s included in strong teaching philosophy examples?

Depending on who you ask, a philosophy of education statement can include a variety of values, beliefs, and information. As you build your own teaching philosophy statement, consider these aspects, and write down your answers to the questions.

Purpose of Education (Core Beliefs)

What do you believe is the purpose of teaching and learning? Why does education matter to today’s children? How will time spent in your classroom help prepare them for the future?

Use your answers to draft the opening statement of your philosophy of education, like these:

• Education isn’t just about what students learn, but about learning how to learn.
• A good education prepares students to be productive and empathetic members of society.
• Teachers help students embrace new information and new ways of seeing the world around them.
• A strong education with a focus on fundamentals ensures students can take on any challenges that come their way.
• I believe education is key to empowering today’s youth, so they’ll feel confident in their future careers, relationships, and duties as members of their community.
• Well-educated students are open-minded, welcoming the opinions of others and knowing how to evaluate information critically and carefully.

Teaching Style and Practices

Do you believe in student-led learning, or do you like to use the Socratic method instead? Is your classroom a place for quiet concentration or sociable collaboration? Do you focus on play-based learning, hands-on practice, debate and discussion, problem-solving, or project-based learning? All teachers use a mix of teaching practices and styles, of course, but there are some you’re likely more comfortable with than others. Possible examples:

• I frequently use project-based learning in my classrooms because I believe it helps make learning more relevant to my students. When students work together to address real-world problems, they use their [subject] knowledge and skills and develop communication and critical thinking abilities too.
• Play-based learning is a big part of my teaching philosophy. Kids who learn through play have more authentic experiences, exploring and discovering the world naturally in ways that make the process more engaging and likely to make a lasting impact.
• In my classroom, technology is key. I believe in teaching students how to use today’s technology in responsible ways, embracing new possibilities and using technology as a tool, not a crutch.
• While I believe in trying new teaching methods, I also find that traditional learning activities can still be effective. My teaching is mainly a mix of lecture, Socratic seminar, and small-group discussions.
• I’m a big believer in formative assessment , taking every opportunity to measure my students’ understanding and progress. I use tools like exit tickets and Kahoot! quizzes, and watch my students closely to see if they’re engaged and on track.
• Group work and discussions play a major role in my instructional style. Students who learn to work cooperatively at a young age are better equipped to succeed in school, in their future careers, and in their communities.

Students and Learning Styles

Why is it important to recognize all learning styles? How do you accommodate different learning styles in your classroom? What are your beliefs on diversity, equity, and inclusion? How do you ensure every student in your classroom receives the same opportunities to learn? How do you expect students to behave, and how do you measure success?

Sample teaching philosophy statements about students might sound like this:

• Every student has their own unique talents, skills, challenges, and background. By getting to know my students as individuals, I can help them find the learning styles that work best for them, now and throughout their education.
• I find that motivated students learn best. They’re more engaged in the classroom and more diligent when working alone. I work to motivate students by making learning relevant, meaningful, and enjoyable.
• We must give every student equal opportunities to learn and grow. Not all students have the same support outside the classroom. So as a teacher, I try to help bridge gaps when I see them and give struggling students a chance to succeed academically.
• I believe every student has their own story and deserves a chance to create and share it. I encourage my students to approach learning as individuals, and I know I’m succeeding when they show a real interest in showing up and learning more every day.
• In my classroom, students take responsibility for their own success. I help them craft their own learning goals, then encourage them to evaluate their progress honestly and ask for help when they need it.
• To me, the best classrooms are those that are the most diverse. Students learn to recognize and respect each other’s differences, celebrating what each brings to the community. They also have the opportunity to find common ground, sometimes in ways that surprise them.

How do I write my philosophy of education?

Think back to any essay you’ve ever written and follow a similar format. Write in the present tense; your philosophy isn’t aspirational, it’s something you already live and follow. This is true even if you’re applying for your first teaching job. Your philosophy is informed by your student teaching, internships, and other teaching experiences.

Lead with your core beliefs about teaching and learning. These beliefs should be reflected throughout the rest of your teaching philosophy statement.

Then, explain your teaching style and practices, being sure to include concrete examples of how you put those practices into action. Transition into your beliefs about students and learning styles, with more examples. Explain why you believe in these teaching and learning styles, and how you’ve seen them work in your experiences.

A long-form philosophy of education statement usually takes a few paragraphs (not generally more than a page or two). From that long-form philosophy, highlight a few key statements and phrases and use them to sum up your teaching philosophy in a couple of well-crafted sentences for your short-form teaching philosophy.

Still feeling overwhelmed? Try answering these three key questions:

• Why do you teach?
• What are your favorite, tried-and-true methods for teaching and learning?
• How do you help students of all abilities and backgrounds learn?

If you can answer those three questions, you can write your teaching philosophy!

Short Philosophy of Education Examples

We asked real educators in the We Are Teachers HELPLINE group on Facebook to share their teaching philosophy examples in a few sentences . Here’s what they had to say:

I am always trying to turn my students into self-sufficient learners who use their resources to figure it out instead of resorting to just asking someone for the answers. —Amy J.

My philosophy is that all students can learn. Good educators meet all students’ differentiated learning needs to help all students meet their maximum learning potential. —Lisa B.

I believe that all students are unique and need a teacher that caters to their individual needs in a safe and stimulating environment. I want to create a classroom where students can flourish and explore to reach their full potential. My goal is also to create a warm, loving environment, so students feel safe to take risks and express themselves. —Valerie T.

In my classroom, I like to focus on the student-teacher relationships/one-on-one interactions. Flexibility is a must, and I’ve learned that you do the best you can with the students you have for however long you have them in your class. —Elizabeth Y

I want to prepare my students to be able to get along without me and take ownership of their learning. I have implemented a growth mindset. —Kirk H.

My teaching philosophy is centered around seeing the whole student and allowing the student to use their whole self to direct their own learning. As a secondary teacher, I also believe strongly in exposing all students to the same core content of my subject so that they have equal opportunities for careers and other experiences dependent upon that content in the future. —Jacky B.

All children learn best when learning is hands-on. This works for the high students and the low students too, even the ones in between. I teach by creating experiences, not giving information. —Jessica R.

As teachers, it’s our job to foster creativity. In order to do that, it’s important for me to embrace the mistakes of my students, create a learning environment that allows them to feel comfortable enough to take chances, and try new methods. —Chelsie L.

I believe that every child can learn and deserves the best, well-trained teacher possible who has high expectations for them. I differentiate all my lessons and include all learning modalities. —Amy S.

All students can learn and want to learn. It is my job to meet them where they are and move them forward. —Holli A.

I believe learning comes from making sense of chaos. My job is to design work that will allow students to process, explore, and discuss concepts to own the learning. I need to be part of the process to guide and challenge perceptions. —Shelly G.

I want my students to know that they are valued members of our classroom community, and I want to teach each of them what they need to continue to grow in my classroom. —Doreen G.

Teach to every child’s passion and encourage a joy for and love of education and school. —Iris B.

I believe in creating a classroom culture of learning through mistakes and overcoming obstacles through teamwork. —Jenn B.

It’s our job to introduce our kids to many, many different things and help them find what they excel in and what they don’t. Then nurture their excellence and help them figure out how to compensate for their problem areas. That way, they will become happy, successful adults. —Haley T.

Longer Philosophy of Education Examples

Looking for longer teaching philosophy examples? Check out these selections from experienced teachers of all ages and grades.

• Learning To Wear the Big Shoes: One Step at a Time
• Nellie Edge: My Kindergarten Teaching Philosophy
• Faculty Focus: My Philosophy of Teaching
• Robinson Elementary School: My Teaching Philosophy
• David Orace Kelly: Philosophy of Education
• Explorations in Higher Education: My Teaching Philosophy Statement
• University of Washington Medical School Faculty Teaching Philosophy Statements

Do you have any philosophy of education examples? Share them in the We Are Teachers HELPLINE Group on Facebook!

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15 Inspiring Teaching Portfolio Examples (Plus How To Create Your Own)

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4 Teaching Philosophy Statement Examples

ThoughtCo / J.R. Bee

• Becoming A Teacher
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• M.S., Education, Buffalo State College
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A teaching philosophy statement, or an educational philosophy statement, is a brief essay that nearly all prospective teachers must write when applying for an academic position. The statement generally reflects on the writer's teaching beliefs and includes concrete examples of how those beliefs have informed the writer's teaching practices.

A well-crafted teaching statement gives a clear and unique portrait of the writer as a teacher. Teaching philosophy statements are important because a clear teaching philosophy can lead to a change in teaching behavior and foster professional and personal growth. As a result, it can also be effective for practicing teachers to conceptualize their teaching approaches by writing a statement—even if they aren't applying for another teaching role.

Examples of Teaching Philosophy Statements

This passage is an example of a strong statement of teaching philosophy because it puts students at the front and center of the teacher's focus. An author who writes such a statement will likely always ensure student needs are the primary focus of all lessons and schoolwork.

"My philosophy of education is that all children are unique and must have a stimulating educational environment where they can grow physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially. It is my desire to create this type of atmosphere where students can meet their full potential. I will provide a safe environment where students are invited to share their ideas and take risks.

"I believe that there are five essential elements that are conducive to learning. (1) The teacher's role is to act as a guide. (2) Students must have access to hands-on activities. (3) Students should be able to have choices and let their curiosity direct their learning. (4) Students need the opportunity to practice skills in a safe environment. (5) Technology must be incorporated into the school day."

The following statement is a good example of a teaching philosophy because the author emphasizes that all classrooms and students are unique, with specific learning needs and styles. A teacher with this philosophy is likely to ensure they spend time helping each student achieve their highest potential.

"I believe that all children are unique and have something special that they can bring to their own education. I will assist my students to express themselves and accept themselves for who they are, as well embrace the differences of others.

"Every classroom has its own unique community; my role as the teacher will be to assist each child in developing their own potential and learning styles. I will present a curriculum that will incorporate each different learning style, as well as make the content relevant to the students' lives. I will incorporate hands-on learning, cooperative learning, projects, themes, and individual work to engage and activate students learning." 

This statement provides a solid example because the author emphasizes the moral objective of teaching: She will hold each student to the highest expectations and ensure each one is diligent in their studies. This statement also implies the teacher will not give up on any student.

"I believe that a teacher is morally obligated to enter the classroom with only the highest of expectations for each and every one of her students. Thus, the teacher maximizes the positive benefits that naturally come along with any self-fulfilling prophecy. With dedication, perseverance, and hard work, her students will rise to the occasion."

"I aim to bring an open mind, a positive attitude, and high expectations to the classroom each day. I believe that I owe it to my students, as well as the community, to bring consistency, diligence, and warmth to my job in the hope that I can ultimately inspire and encourage such traits in the children as well."

The following statement takes a slightly different approach. It states that classrooms should be warm and caring communities, and unlike the first two sample statements, it focuses more on community-based learning, as opposed to an individualized approach. The teaching strategies mentioned, such as morning meetings and community problem-solving, follow this community-based philosophy.

"I believe that a classroom should be a safe, caring community where children are free to speak their mind, blossom, and grow. I will use strategies to ensure our classroom community will flourish, like the morning meeting, positive vs. negative discipline, classroom jobs, and problem-solving skills.

"Teaching is a process of learning from your students, colleagues, parents, and the community. This is a lifelong process where you learn new strategies, new ideas, and new philosophies. Over time, my educational philosophy may change, and that's okay. That just means that I have grown and learned new things."

Components of a Teaching Philosophy Statement

A teaching philosophy statement should include an introduction, body, and conclusion—just as you would expect of your students if they were writing a paper. But there are other specific components that you need to include:

Introduction: This should be your thesis statement where you discuss your general belief about education (such as: "I believe all students have a right to learn"), as well as your teaching ideals. Consider what students will have learned once they depart your class, and what those lessons learned say about your teaching philosophy and strategies.

Body: ​In this part of the statement, discuss what you see as the ideal classroom environment and how it makes you a better teacher, addresses student needs, and facilitates interactions between parents and their children. Discuss how you would facilitate age-appropriate learning  and involve students in the assessment process . Explain how you would put your educational ​​ideals into practice.

Clearly state your goals and objectives for students. Layout specifically what you hope your teaching will help students to accomplish. Be specific by telling a story or detailing a teaching strategy you've used. Doing so helps your reader understand how your teaching philosophy would play out in the classroom.

Conclusion : In this section, talk about your goals as a teacher, how you have been able to meet them in the past, and how you can build on them to meet future challenges. Focus on your personal approach to pedagogy and classroom management, as well as what makes you unique as an educator, and how you wish to advance your career.

Cite your sources. Explain where your teaching philosophy originated—for example, from your experiences as an undergraduate, from a faculty mentor you worked with during your teacher-training program, or perhaps from books or articles on teaching that had a particular influence on you.

Formatting Your Statement

There are some general rules to follow when writing a teaching philosophy statement.

Keep it brief. The statement should be no more than one-to-two pages, double-spaced.

Use present tense , and write the statement in the first person, as the previous examples illustrate.

Avoid jargon. Use common, everyday language, and not technical terms. If you must use jargon, explain what you're writing about in everyday terms as well.

Be personal. Make sure you talk about your experiences and beliefs, and ensure your statement is original and truly describes the methods and philosophy you would employ in teaching.

Vanderbilt University. " Teaching Statements ."

The Chronicle of Higher Education. " 4 Steps to a Memorable Teaching Philosophy ."

The Ohio State University. " Philosophy of Teaching Statement ."

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• An Educational Leadership Philosophy for School Leaders
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Your teaching philosophy is a self-reflective statement of your beliefs about teaching and learning. It's a one to two page narrative that conveys your core ideas about being an effective teacher in the context of your discipline. It develops these ideas with specific, concrete examples of what the teacher and learners will do to achieve those goals. Importantly, your teaching philosophy statement also explains why you choose these options.

+ Getting Started

Your reasons for writing a teaching philosophy may vary. You might be writing it as an exercise in concisely documenting your beliefs so that you can easily articulate them to your students, peers, or a search committee. It might serve as the introduction to your teaching portfolio. Or, it can serve as a means of professional growth as it requires you to give examples of how you enact your philosophy, thus requiring you to consider the degree to which your teaching is congruent with your beliefs.

Generating ideas

Teaching philosophies express your values and beliefs about teaching. They are personal statements that introduce you, as a teacher, to your reader. As such, they are written in the first person and convey a confident, professional tone. When writing a teaching philosophy, use specific examples to illustrate your points. You should also discuss how your values and beliefs about teaching fit into the context of your discipline.

Below are categories you might address with prompts to help you begin generating ideas. Work through each category, spending time thinking about the prompts and writing your ideas down. These notes will comprise the material you’ll use to write the first draft of your teaching philosophy statement. It will help if you include both general ideas (‘I endeavor to create lifelong learners’) as well as specifics about how you will enact those goals. A teaching philosophy template is also available to help you get started.

Questions to prompt your thinking

Your concept of learning.

What do you mean by learning? What happens in a successful learning situation? Note what constitutes "learning" or "mastery" in your discipline.

Your concept of teaching

What are your values, beliefs, and aspirations as a teacher? Do you wish to encourage mastery, competency, transformational learning, lifelong learning, general transference of skills, critical thinking? What does a perfect teaching situation look like to you and why? How are the values and beliefs realized in classroom activities? You may discuss course materials, lesson plans, activities, assignments, and assessment instruments.

Your goals for students

What skills should students obtain as a result of your teaching? Think about your ideal student and what the outcomes of your teaching would be in terms of this student's knowledge or behavior. Address the goals you have for specific classes or curricula and that rational behind them (i.e., critical thinking, writing, or problem solving).

Your teaching methods

What methods will you consider to reach these goals and objectives? What are your beliefs regarding learning theory and specific strategies you would use, such as case studies, group work, simulations, interactive lectures? You might also want to include any new ideas or strategies you want to try.

Your interaction with students

What are you attitudes towards advising and mentoring students? How would an observer see you interact with students? Why do you want to work with students?

Assessing learning

How will you assess student growth and learning? What are your beliefs about grading? Do you grade students on a percentage scale (criterion referenced) or on a curve (norm referenced)? What different types of assessment will you use (i.e. traditional tests, projects, portfolios,  presentations) and why?

Professional growth

How will you continue growing as a teacher? What goals do you have for yourself and how will you reach them? How have your attitudes towards teaching and learning changed over time? How will you use student evaluations to improve your teaching? How might you learn new skills? How do you know when you've taught effectively?

+ Creating a Draft

Two ways of organizing your draft.

Now that you've written down your values, attitudes, and beliefs about teaching and learning, it's time to organize those thoughts into a coherent form. Perhaps the easiest way of organizing this material would be to write a paragraph covering each of the seven prompts you answered in the Getting Started section. These would then become the seven major sections of your teaching philosophy.

Another way of knitting your reflections together—and one that is more personal—is to read through your notes and underscore ideas or observations that come up more than once. Think of these as "themes" that might point you toward an organizational structure for the essay. For example, you read through your notes and realize that you spend a good deal of time writing about your interest in mentoring students. This might become one of the three or four major foci of your teaching philosophy. You should then discuss what it says about your attitudes toward teaching, learning, and what's important in your discipline.

No matter which style you choose, make sure to keep your writing succinct. Aim for two double-spaced pages. And don't forget to start with a "hook." Your job is to make your readers want to read more; their level of engagement is highest when they read your opening line. Hook your readers by beginning with a question, a statement, or even an event from your past.

Using specific examples

Remember to provide concrete examples from your teaching practice to illustrate the general claims you make in your teaching philosophy. The following general statements about teaching are intended as prompts to help you come up with examples to illustrate your claims about teaching. For each statement, how would you describe what happens in your classroom? Is your description specific enough to bring the scene to life in a teaching philosophy?

"I value helping my students understand difficult information. I am an expert, and my role is to model for them complex ways of thinking so that they can develop the same habits of mind as professionals in the medical field."

"I enjoy lecturing, and I'm good at it. I always make an effort to engage and motivate my students when I lecture."

"It is crucial for students of geology to learn the techniques of field research. An important part of my job as a professor of geology is to provide these opportunities."

"I believe that beginning physics students should be introduced to the principles of hypothesis generation, experimentation, data collection, and analysis. By learning the scientific method, they develop critical thinking skills they can apply to other areas of their lives. Small group work is a crucial tool for teaching the scientific method."

"As a teacher of writing, I am committed to using peer review in my classes. By reading and commenting on other students' work in small cooperative groups, my students learn to find their voice, to understand the important connection between writer and audience, and to hone their editing skills. Small group work is indispensible in the writing classroom."

Go back to the notes you made when getting started and underline the general statements you’ve made about teaching and learning. As you start drafting, make sure to note the specific approaches, methods, or products you use to realize those goals.

+ Assessing Your Draft

Assessing your draft teaching philosophy.

According to a survey of search committee chairs by the University of Michigan Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, there are five elements that are shared by strong teaching philosophy statements:

• They offer evidence of practice (specific examples)
• They are student-centered
• They demonstrate reflectiveness
• They demonstrate that the writer values teaching
• They are well written, clear, and readable

Now that you’ve completed an initial draft, ask whether your statement captures these elements and how well you articulate them.

You might find it useful to compare your draft to other teaching philosophies in your discipline. It can also be useful to have a colleague review your draft and offer recommendations for revision. Consider printing out a teaching philosophy rubric from our “Rubrics and Samples” tab to provide your reviewer with guidelines to assess your draft. These exercises will give you the critical distance necessary to see your teaching philosophy objectively and revise it accordingly.

+ Rubrics and Samples

Rubrics and sample teaching philosophies.

Here are links to three teaching philosophy rubrics to help you assess your statement. We have included four different rubrics for you to choose from. These rubrics cover similar elements, and one is not necessarily better than the other. Your choice of which to use should be guided by how comfortable you feel with the particular instrument and how usable you find it. 

• Teaching Philosophy Rubric 1   This rubric allows a reader to rate several elements of persuasiveness and format on a scale of 1 to 5.
• Teaching Philosophy Rubric 2   This rubric contains prompts for assessing purpose and audience, voice, beliefs and support, and conventions.
• Teaching Philosophy Rubric 3   This rubric contains prompts for assessing content, format, and writing quality.
• Rubric for Statements of Teaching Philosophy  This rubric was developed by Kaplan et. al. from the University of Michigan.
• Marisol Brito – philosophy 
• Benjamin Harrison – biology  
• Jamie Peterson – psychology
• The University of Michigan has a wide variety of  samples  organized by field of study.
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What Is a Teaching Philosophy? Examples and Prompts

The life of a teacher is an extremely busy one. From early morning until long after dark, teachers dedicate the better part of their day to their students. Amid the lesson planning, the snack breaks, the recess duty, grading and the myriad other daily tasks, it can be easy to lose sight of the why of teaching. 

Why are you drawn to the classroom, and what is it about your love of teaching that makes it a fulfilling career? What’s the overarching philosophy that guides your teaching practice? Even on the busiest school days, every teacher should be able to explain their “why” by returning to their teaching philosophy.

What Is a Teaching Philosophy Statement?

Teaching philosophy prompts, components of a teaching philosophy statement, formatting your teaching philosophy statement [plus best practices], teaching philosophy examples , faqs about teaching philosophies, helpful resource links.

Simply put, a teaching philosophy is a written statement that includes: 

• Your core belief(s) about the purpose of teaching and learning 
• A high-level description of how you teach 
• An explanation of why you teach that way
• Any primary specializations 
• Examples of your teaching philosophy in practice in the classroom (if space allows)

A teaching philosophy statement should demonstrate that you are purposeful, reflective and goal-oriented each time you stand at the front of your class. Not only does committing this statement to writing help to solidify your own beliefs — it can help you collaborate with other teachers, apply for jobs and even write grant proposals. Ideally, evidence of your philosophy will be apparent in your resume and portfolio content. 

Depending on the context, a teaching philosophy statement can be several sentences or several pages long. You will occasionally be asked to provide some form of this statement when applying for certain academic or administrative positions. Versions of it may also appear as the introduction to your teaching portfolio, as your LinkedIn bio, your resume objective statement or your bio for any accreditations (such as for contributions to a publication, awards, volunteer work, etc.). 

You will likely never be asked to recite it. That said, when sitting for interviews, teaching applicants should demonstrate a clear teaching philosophy through their answers.

Think about your teaching philosophy as your teaching portrait. 

Portraits can look different depending on the subject’s age and life experiences, and a teaching philosophy is no different. Younger teachers may focus on their goals and any areas of interest they studied in college. More senior teachers may update their philosophy statements to reflect their lived experiences in the classroom and how those experiences informed (or resulted from) their teaching philosophy.  

The clearer and more crystallized your teaching philosophy is, the easier it will be to draw upon it in the classroom. Use any combination of the following prompts — organized from immediate to future-facing — to begin writing your own philosophy statement.  

The basics 

Why did you decide to become a teacher? 

What teaching methods do you use?

How do you assess your students’ learning and growth?

Do you follow certain standards?

What are your strongest qualities as a teacher?

Do you have an academic specialization?

Why do you like to teach certain subjects?

How do you use technology in the classroom ?

How do you incorporate new techniques, activities, curriculum and technology into your teaching?

Student advocacy  

How do you motivate your students?

How do you think students learn best? 

How do you approach learners who are struggling?

How do you promote and maintain educational equity ?

How would you describe your interactions with your students?

Preservation in the classroom

What’s your classroom management style ? 

How do you handle stress ?

Describe a time you handled a challenging situation.

The Big Questions 

How do you define learning? 

How do you define teaching? 

What is the purpose of education?

How does education improve society?

Do you believe all students can learn?

What does it take to be a good teacher?

Looking ahead

What goals do you have for your students?

What goals do you have for yourself?

What achievements do you like to see at the end of every school year? 

Why do you continue to want to teach?

How will you continue to grow professionally?

Just like leading students through an essay prompt, begin by creating an outline around a single thesis statement. Build a case for your core belief by giving specific examples and demonstrating an in-depth knowledge of pedagogy. Be sure to connect philosophical statements to practical outcomes or examples; otherwise, you risk the “word salad” problem, wherein the statement sounds nice but means very little to the average reader. (See Formatting Your Teaching Philosophy Statement [Plus Best Practices] below for more tips.)

>>Related Reading: 5 Reasons Why Continuing Education Matters for Educators

Be prepared for your philosophy to change over time — it’s not meant to live in stone! If you feel you need to re-write it, follow the prompts above to recrystallize your beliefs and objectives.

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In a one- or two-sentence teaching philosophy statement, you’ll likely touch on your experience, grade and subject specialization, preferred methods and high-level goals. When crafting a longer statement, it should contain some specific components that paint the clearest picture of your teaching style. 

According to the University of Minnesota , strong teaching philosophy statements share the following elements:

• Offer evidence of practice (specific examples)
• Are student-centered
• Demonstrate reflectiveness
• Demonstrate that the writer values teaching
• Are well written, clear and readable

Long-form teaching philosophy statements should follow the same tried-and-true format as a well-crafted student essay:

Introduction

This first section should include mention of: 

• Your teaching methods
• Any subject or pedagogical specialties
• Your preferred method of assessment
• Your high-level goals for all students

As you go into more detail about your experience and teaching practice, it’s a good idea to give examples that support your philosophy. If you choose to cite any educational researchers or studies, be sure you credit your sources. You may want to touch upon:

• A list of courses you have taught
• A list or short descriptions of effective learning engagements
• What you consider the ideal classroom environment
• Your personal approach to classroom management
• How you facilitate age-appropriate learning
• How you facilitate learning for students of differing abilities
• How you involve students in their own learning and assessment
• An example of a challenge you solved in the classroom 

Conclusion 

A good teacher is never done growing and learning. Wrap up your philosophy statement by describing your objectives, which should include student-oriented academic goals, professional development goals and the ideal outcomes of your teaching career. Your conclusion could include: 

• content mastery
• discovery and knowledge generation
• critical thinking
• problem solving
• individual fulfillment
• self-directed learning
• experiential learning
• engaged citizenship
• …or something else?
• The goals you’ve already achieved as a teacher, as well as those in progress
• What makes you unique as an educator

If you are asked for supplemental materials as part of a teaching job application, you can provide: 

• Peer reviews
• Letters of recommendation
• Students’ comments
• Performance ratings
• Lesson plans
• Teaching activities

Your teaching philosophy is unique to you, so there is no right or wrong way to go about it. That said, there are some best practices to follow when it comes to formatting and readability to make it easy for potential employers and others to read. 

Write in the first person: You’re writing about your own goals, vision and philosophy — it’s okay to use “I” statements! 

Write in the present tense: Your philosophy statement should reflect your current views and experience level, not those you hope to have someday.

Avoid wordiness: Your teaching philosophy should be easy enough for an eighth-grade reader to understand, barring any pedagogical terminology. Making simple concepts more complicated for show is an easy way to lose your reader. Unless you’re going for a university lecturer position, avoid the AP-level vocabulary words on principle. 

Use specific examples: Potential employers — or readers of your academic papers — want to know how your philosophy plays out in the classroom. Your expertise in project-based learning (PBL) will carry more weight if you can describe a specific assignment you designed around PBL, and what the outcome was. 

Skip the clichés: If you say you want to teach to “change the world,” or that you believe “children are our future,” be prepared to give concrete examples of what you mean. Teaching philosophies are not meant to be abstract or even overly aspirational — leave this to motivational posters. 

If you find you are struggling to craft your ideal philosophy statement, ask a colleague to review and highlight possible areas for expansion or clarification. You can even ask this colleague to note any recurring themes they notice, so you can mention them briefly in your introduction. Compare your draft to others in your field with similar specialities or levels of experience and make changes as necessary.

The easiest way to maintain and share your philosophy statement and portfolio is to keep everything in a digital format. Whether that’s an editable PDF you can make small changes or updates to, or a cloud-based folder you can invite others to view, digital is the safest and most portable format.  

Here are some examples of teaching philosophy statements from real teachers. Note that each statement will not follow all of the prompts above, but this is because each statement should be unique and personal to each educator. 

“My philosophy of education is that all children are unique and must have a stimulating educational environment where they can grow mentally, emotionally, and socially. It is my desire to create this type of atmosphere where students can meet their full potential. I will provide a safe environment where students are invited to share their ideas and take risks. They should be able to have choices and let their curiosity direct their learning as I operate as a facilitator.” Mr. B., Language Arts, 5th & 6th grade

Do I need a teaching philosophy to get a teaching job?

Most teachers who earn master’s degrees are asked to write a philosophy statement as part of their program. Whether or not you have a master’s degree in education, you may be asked to provide some form of a teaching philosophy statement when applying for certain academic or administrative positions. You may also want to craft a version of this statement as the introduction to your teaching portfolio, as your LinkedIn bio, your resume objective statement or your bio for any accreditations (such as for contributions to a publication, awards, volunteer work, etc.).

You will likely never be asked to recite your teaching philosophy, and a lack of a formal written philosophy should not bar you from consideration for teaching jobs. That said, when sitting for interviews, teaching applicants should demonstrate a clear teaching philosophy through their answers.

Can I change my teaching philosophy?

Yes! In fact, teachers should expect their philosophy to change with time, experience, and professional and personal development. If at any point you feel you need to re-write your philosophy statement, follow the prompts in this article to recrystallize your beliefs and objectives.

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Embracing Inclusion: A Philosophy of Special Education

Introduction:

Special Education is a field that continuously evolves to promote the equitable and inclusive education of students with disabilities. As an educator, my philosophy of special education is rooted in the belief that all children, including those with disabilities, have the potential to learn and succeed. I recognize the profound impact of legislation such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and Section 504 in safeguarding the rights of children with disabilities. This essay will explore various issues related to special education, including the obstacles faced by students with disabilities, instructional placement, and the roles of special education and general education teachers.

All children, even those with disabilities, can learn.

I believe that all children, regardless of their disabilities, have the ability to learn and grow academically, socially, and emotionally. However, it is important to acknowledge that each child is unique and possesses different strengths, challenges, and learning styles. By embracing a strengths-based approach, educators can tap into students’ abilities and create tailored learning experiences that cater to their individual needs. Differentiation, accommodations, and modifications are essential tools to ensure that all students have access to high-quality education and can maximize their learning potential (Supports, modifications, and accommodations for students 2020).

Impact of IDEA and Section 504. IDEA and Section 504 have been pivotal in promoting the rights of students with disabilities and ensuring their access to appropriate educational services (US Dept of Education, 2023). IDEA mandates that students with disabilities receive a free and appropriate public education (FAPE) in the least restrictive environment (LRE). It emphasizes the importance of individualized education programs (IEPs) and the involvement of parents in the decision-making process. Section 504 prohibits discrimination based on disability in programs receiving federal funding, extending protection to students who may not meet IDEA’s specific eligibility criteria.

The legislative acts have had a profound impact on children with disabilities, providing them with legal safeguards, access to necessary supports and accommodations, and opportunities for inclusion in general education settings. They foster a culture of acceptance and encourage the development of inclusive practices that benefit not only students with disabilities but also their peers.

Obstacles faced by students with disabilities and instructional strategies. Students with disabilities may encounter various obstacles in their educational journey. These obstacles can include academic challenges, social isolation, limited access to resources and potential negative attitudes and stereotypes from peers and educators. To help them overcome these difficulties, a range of instructional strategies can be employed (Heward, Alber-Morgan, & Konrad, 2017). What follows is a list with a brief description of select strategies:

· Differentiated Instruction : Tailoring instruction to meet the diverse needs of students is crucial. By employing varied instructional methods, materials, and assessment, educators can ensure that students with disabilities are engaged, challenged, and supported at their individual level.

· Universal Design for Learning (UDL) : UDL provides a framework for creating flexible learning environments that accommodates the diverse needs of all students. By providing multiple means of representation, action and expression, and engagement, educators can enhance accessibility and remove barriers to learning.

· Assistive Technology : Utilizing assistive technology tools can empower students with disabilities to participate more fully in the learning process. Assistive devices, software, and other technological supports can help overcome specific challenges and enhance independence and academic achievement.

Considerations for educational placement: The decision regarding where students with disabilities should receive their education is a complex one and must be based on individual needs of each student (Heward, et. al, 2017). While inclusive education, where students with disabilities learn alongside their non-disabled peers, is a highly desirable goal, it is essential to strike a balance that ensures both academic progress and social-emotional well-being.

Factors to consider include the specific disability and its impact on the student’s learning, the availability of support services and resources, the commitment and capacity of schools to implement inclusive practices, and the preferences and goals of the student and their family. Collaboration between parents, educators, and specialists is crucial in making informed decisions that prioritize the students best interests.

The role of the special education teacher. The special education teacher plays a crucial role in the education of students with disabilities. They are advocates, facilitators, collaborators, and nurturers (Heward, et. al, 2017).. The primary responsibility of special education teachers includes individualized instruction , whereby special education teachers develop and implement IEPs, tailoring instruction to meet the unique needs and goals of each student. They provide targeted interventions, accommodations, and modifications to support student progress; collaboration with general education teachers, parents, specialists, and other stakeholders to create inclusive and supportive learning environments. They share expertise, communicate student progress, and ensure that accommodations and supports are effectively implemented. Special education teachers also advocate for the rights and needs of students with disabilities. They strive to foster an inclusive school culture, promote awareness and acceptance, and address any barriers or discriminatory practices that may arise.

The role of the general education teacher. General education teachers also play a vital role in the instruction of students with disabilities (Heward, et. al, 2017).. They are responsible for creating inclusive classrooms and ensuring that students with disabilities have equal access to the general education curriculum. General education teachers differentiate instruction to meet the diverse needs of all students, including those with disabilities. They provide flexible learning opportunities, scaffold instruction, and collaborate with special education teachers to ensure that students are appropriately challenged. General education teachers foster inclusion by creating a welcoming and accepting classroom environment, promoting positive peer interactions and valuing the contributions of all students. They model inclusive practices and encourage collaboration and support among students. Finally, general education teachers work closely with special education teachers therapists, and other specialists to implement accommodations and modifications effectively. They communicate student progress, share instructional strategies, and engage in professional development to enhance their ability to support students with disabilities.

Conclusion.

In conclusion, my philosophy of special education centers around the belief in the potential of all students to learn and grow, regardless of their disabilities. Through the impact of legislation such as IDEA and Section 504, we have made significant strides in promoting inclusive practices and ensuring that students with disabilities receive the supports they need. By employing instructional strategies that prioritize differentiation UDL, and assistive technology, we can overcome the obstacles faced by students with disabilities and provide them with meaningful and inclusive educational experiences. The important roles performed by special education and general education teachers are integral in creating a supportive and inclusive learning environment where all students can thrive. By embracing these principles, we can foster a society that celebrates diversity and empowers every individual to reach their full potential.

Heward, W. L., Alber-Morgan, S. R., & Konrad, M. (2017). Exceptional Children: An Introduction to Special Education (Eleventh). Pearson Education.

“Supports, Modifications, and Accommodations for Students.” Center for Parent Information and Resources , Mar. 2020, [Retrieved 29 June, 2023] from www.parentcenterhub.org/accommodations/.

US Department of Education. (2023, June 1). Protecting students with disabilities . Office of Civil Rights. [Retrieved 29 June, 2023] from https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/504faq.html

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Special Education Philosophies

Welcome to the world of special education! As you step into this field, you will discover a variety of approaches and philosophies that educators and parents use to help children with diverse learning needs. Each approach has its unique focus and aims to create a supportive and inclusive environment for students to thrive. Differentiated instruction caters to individual learning styles and abilities, helping all students engage meaningfully with the curriculum.

For instance, some special education philosophies prioritize meeting the individual student’s needs, tailoring instruction to suit their unique learning style and abilities. Others prioritize the social and emotional development of the student, seeking to create a safe and supportive community where children feel valued and empowered. A solid research base, such as that from the Child Mind Institute , shows the impact of such an environment on a child’s learning and development.

Regardless of the approach, special education aims to help children with special needs achieve their full potential and develop the skills necessary to lead fulfilling lives. This goal aligns with guidelines outlined by entities like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) . It’s a challenging and rewarding field, and we’re excited to explore the various philosophies and approaches that make it unique and impactful.

So join us as we delve into the fascinating world of special education philosophies and discover the strategies and methods that have helped countless children overcome challenges and thrive in the classroom and beyond.

Philosophical Foundation of Special and Inclusive Education

The philosophical foundation of special and inclusive education is based on the belief that all children have the right to access education and receive appropriate support to achieve their full potential, regardless of their background or abilities. This philosophy is rooted in equality, social justice, and human rights.

One of the key principles of special and inclusive education is the idea of individual differences. It recognizes that every child has unique strengths, weaknesses, learning styles, and abilities. Therefore, it emphasizes the importance of providing personalized and differentiated instruction to meet the diverse needs of learners.

Another important principle is the idea of social inclusion. This philosophy recognizes that every child has the right to participate fully in society and to have equal access to opportunities, regardless of their disabilities or differences. Inclusive education seeks to remove barriers and create a supportive and welcoming environment that celebrates diversity and promotes respect, empathy, and understanding.

Furthermore, special and inclusive education emphasizes the importance of collaboration and partnership between families, educators, and the wider community. It recognizes that children’s education and development are influenced by multiple factors, including their home environment, social and cultural background, and access to resources and support. Therefore, it advocates for a collaborative approach that involves all stakeholders in the decision-making process and ensures that children receive comprehensive and coordinated support.

In summary, special and inclusive education’s philosophical foundation is grounded in individual differences, social inclusion, and collaboration. It recognizes that every child is unique and has the right to access education and achieve their full potential. It seeks to create a supportive, inclusive environment that promotes respect, understanding, and equality.

Philosophy of Special Education Essay:

Philosophy on individual differences in special education.

My philosophy on individual differences in special education is that every student is unique and has strengths, challenges, and learning styles. As a special education teacher , I create an inclusive and supportive learning environment that respects and values these individual differences.

In my view, the first step in addressing individual differences is to recognize and celebrate the strengths and abilities of each student. This means acknowledging and building on what each student can do rather than focusing solely on their areas of challenge or disability. By fostering a strengths-based approach, we can help students develop confidence and self-esteem and give them opportunities to shine.

At the same time, it is important to recognize and address each student’s challenges and areas of need. This means providing individualized instruction, accommodations, and modifications tailored to each student’s needs and learning style. It also means creating a learning environment that is flexible and adaptable so that students can learn at their own pace and in a way that works best for them.

Another key aspect of my philosophy on individual differences in special education is the importance of promoting diversity and inclusivity. This means creating a classroom culture where all students feel valued and respected, regardless of their background, culture, or disability. It also means promoting understanding and empathy and helping students learn to appreciate and celebrate the differences and unique qualities of others.

In conclusion, my philosophy on individual differences in special education is rooted in the belief that every student is unique and has strengths, challenges, and learning styles. As a special education teacher, I am responsible for creating an inclusive and supportive learning environment that recognizes and celebrates these individual differences and provides each student with the support and resources they need to achieve their full potential. We can help all students thrive academically and personally by embracing diversity and inclusivity.

Philosophy on Social Inclusion

The philosophy of social inclusion in special education is based on the belief that every student, regardless of their background, culture, or disability, has the right to feel included and valued in the classroom and society as a whole. As a special education teacher, my philosophy on social inclusion is centered on creating a learning environment that is accepting, respectful, and supportive of all students.

Social inclusion begins with creating a classroom culture that celebrates diversity and promotes understanding and empathy. This means providing opportunities for students to learn about and appreciate the differences and unique qualities of others. It also means creating a safe and welcoming learning environment where all students feel valued and respected and where bullying, discrimination, and exclusion are not tolerated.

Another key aspect of my philosophy of social inclusion is the importance of providing individualized instruction, accommodations, and modifications tailored to each student’s specific needs and learning style. This means recognizing and addressing each student’s unique challenges and areas of need and providing them with the support and resources they need to succeed. It also means creating a learning environment that is flexible and adaptable so that students can learn at their own pace and in a way that works best for them.

Finally, I believe that social inclusion also involves promoting access to opportunities and resources that can help students with disabilities participate fully in society. This means advocating for equal access to education, employment, and other community resources and providing support services and accommodations to help students with disabilities achieve their goals and reach their full potential.

In conclusion, the philosophy of social inclusion in special education is centered on creating a learning environment that is accepting, respectful, and supportive of all students and recognizes and addresses each student’s unique challenges and areas of need. By promoting social inclusion, we can help all students feel valued and respected and provide them with the support and resources they need to thrive academically and personally.

Personal Philosophy of Special Education as a Teacher

As a special education teacher, my philosophy centers around the belief that every student has the potential to learn, grow, and achieve success, regardless of their background or abilities. I believe it’s my responsibility to create a safe, supportive, and inclusive environment that fosters learning, promotes individual growth, and celebrates diversity.

One of the key aspects of my philosophy is the recognition that every student has a unique learning style and abilities. Therefore, I strive to provide personalized and differentiated instruction that meets the diverse needs of my students. I believe it’s essential to create individualized education plans (IEPs) tailored to each student’s strengths, weaknesses, and goals. This involves working collaboratively with parents, colleagues, and other professionals to identify the best strategies and approaches to support each student’s learning.

In addition, I believe that social and emotional development is just as important as academic achievement. I strive to create a positive and respectful classroom culture that promotes social and emotional growth, encourages self-expression, and builds self-esteem. This involves creating opportunities for students to develop social skills, problem-solving abilities, and a sense of community and belonging.

Special Education My Philosophy

Another important aspect of my philosophy is recognizing that special education is not just about teaching students with disabilities but also about empowering them to become active and engaged members of society. I believe it’s my responsibility to help my students develop the skills and confidence they need to navigate the world and achieve their personal and professional goals. This involves providing opportunities for real-world learning, promoting self-advocacy, and encouraging independence and self-determination.

My philosophy of Sped as a teacher is grounded in individualized instruction, social and emotional development, and empowerment. I believe every student has the right to access education and achieve their full potential, and I am responsible for supporting them in this journey.

Special Education Philosophies | Types of Special Education Structures

Special education structures refer to how schools and educational systems are organized to provide specialized services and support to students with disabilities or special needs. Special education frameworks come in various forms, each with a particular purpose and strategy.

Philosophy of Special Education Examples

• Self-Contained Classrooms: These classrooms are designed to provide specialized instruction and support to students with more severe disabilities or complex needs. The classroom is typically staffed with a special education teacher and additional support staff, and the curriculum is tailored to meet the unique needs of each student.
• Resource Rooms : Resource rooms are designed to support students with disabilities who may need extra help in specific subject areas, such as reading or math. These rooms are typically staffed by a special education teacher who provides individual or small-group instruction.
• Inclusion Classrooms: Inclusion classrooms are designed to support students with disabilities in general education. Students with disabilities are included in regular classes and receive support from a special education teacher, who may co-teach the class with a general education teacher or provide additional instruction outside of class.
• Pull-Out Services: Pull-out services involve taking students out of their regular classroom for specialized instruction and support. These services may include speech therapy, occupational therapy, or counseling.
• Collaborative Teaching : Collaborative teaching involves two or more teachers, a general education and a special education teacher, working together to provide instruction to a mixed group of students with and without disabilities. This approach emphasizes teacher collaboration and teamwork and seeks to create a supportive and inclusive learning environment.

In summary, special education structures include self-contained classrooms, resource rooms, inclusion classrooms, pull-out services, and collaborative teaching. Each structure has its unique focus and approach, and schools and educational systems may use a combination of these structures to provide specialized services and support to students with disabilities or special needs.

For additional information on Special Education Philosophies, click here: philosophy of special education pdf, philosophy of special education ppt. I hope you enjoyed today’s discussions on Special Education Philosophies.

Jennifer Hanson is a dedicated and seasoned writer specializing in the field of special education. With a passion for advocating for the rights and needs of children with diverse learning abilities, Jennifer uses her pen to educate, inspire, and empower both educators and parents alike.

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59 Teaching Philosophy Statement Examples

A statement of teaching philosophy is a requirement for all teachers.

This statement shows future employers, parents and colleagues what you value as an educator and what your teaching skills are .

Examples of things to emphasize in a teaching philosophy statement include:

• A student-centered approach to education.
• A focus on active learning.
• High expectations for yourself and your students.
• Your ideal learning environment.
• Your approach to technology in the classroom.
• How you motivate your students.
• Your approach to assessment.

Here are 57 teaching philosophy statement examples that you could get some ideas from.

Teaching Philosophy Statement Examples

1. you create a student-centered learning environment.

• “I aspire to create student-centered learning environments in which the student is in the driving seat of their own learning.”
• “My classrooms are always focused on the specific needs of my students. I work hard to differentiate learning so that each student’s unique skills are emphasized.”

“I always ensure that my lessons involve multiple learning modalities so that students learn through their preferred learning style.”

• “Central to my pedagogy is a focus on the needs of students. I embrace Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development as a key pedagogical tool to ensure all students are taught content that is achievable yet challenging.”
• “For me, the ideal classroom environment is student-centered. I strive to create learning scenarios where the students are undertaking group projects while I move between groups facilitating discussions.”

2. You have a Focus on Active Learning

• “I embrace a Constructivist pedagogy that emphasizes active discovery learning on the part of my students. All my lessons are designed to have students learning through doing: trial-and-error, solving problems, and creating new solutions.”
• “My classrooms are spaces for exploration and discovery. I favor practical lessons in which students get hands-on experience of the subjects under analysis.”

“Students learn best when they are actively engaged in their own learning. Passive approaches where students take notes and listen during teacher-centered lessons are not as conducive to deep learning as lessons in which students are learning through discovery.”

• “One example teaching strategy that I often employ is the guided practice or ‘I do, we do, you do’ method . This approach starts with teacher modelling a practice but involves the gradual release of responsibility to the student until the student can undertake tasks on their own.”

Read Also: 47 One-Sentence Teacher Vision Statements

3. You Set High Expectations

• “While I like to see students enjoying themselves in class, I also insist on hard work and focus on the task at hand.”
• “I set high standards and high expectations by promoting growth mindsets among my students. All my students know that I expect them to try their hardest and strive for improvement every day.”

“I always expect my students to come to class ready to focus and engage. I often ask my students to set their own goals and take steps toward achieving their goals every day.”

• “I encourage students to walk into the classroom with a positive attitude toward learning. The best classes occur when students know that they are expected to do their best each and every day.”
• “Students enter my classroom with the knowledge that I expect them to engage with the learning materials. I keep a strong focus on creating a serious learning environment. This starts with me insisting on focus and engagement from the minute students walk in the door.”

4. You are a Community Engaged Teacher

• “I strive to develop connections between students and the school community. When community members come into the classroom, students not only learn about people from various walks of life. They also get to see role models of different shapes and sizes around the community.”

“I like to invite parents into my classrooms so they can feel that they are a partner in teaching. I set myself goals to contact all parents throughout the school term to listen to them and learn from their deep knowledge of their own children.”

• “In this culturally diverse area, I make every effort to expose my students to community members from diverse cultural backgrounds. It is important to me that students feel a connection to the rich local community in which they learn.”

5. Learning Environment Statements

• “I aim to create learning environments that are rich in resources so that students can learn through practical learning scenarios.”

“I create classrooms that empower students to make decisions for themselves so that they develop self-confidence and thinking skills .”

• “I develop learning environments that have multiple workstations in which students can work in groups to solve problems. I find group-based classroom layouts (through table seating) help children to communicate and learn from one another while learning.”

6. You have a Holistic Approach

• “I follow a holistic approach to child development. Educators need to pay attention to students’ social, physical, emotional and cognitive development equally to help raise balanced children for the 21st Century.”

“I do my best to get to know my students so I can best meet their needs. I focus on not only their cognitive development but also their emotional and social wellbeing , which is equally necessary for learning to occur.”

• “My teaching philosophy is strongly influenced by Abraham Maslow’s humanist approach and in particular his Hierarchy of Needs. I aim to ensure students’ basic needs are met in the classroom so that they feel happy, comfortable, safe and welcomed into the classroom. When students’ basic needs are met, they can focus on learning and personal development.”

7. You Promote Critical Thinking

• “I write my lessons to target higher-order thinking skills from Bloom’s Taxonomy, for example ‘creating’, ‘inquiring’ and ‘critiquing’. I aim to have all my students think critically about themselves and the world around them.”
• “It is my goal to have my students think outside the box, critique the everyday assumptions they take for granted, and leave my classes with more questions than answers.”

“I aspire to be a teacher who instils a love of learning, analysis and critical thinking in all the students I encounter.”

• “I believe students of the 21st Century need more than just knowledge. Students need to have critical and creative thinking skills so that they can compete for the jobs of the future. To encourage a critical thinking approach, I consistently ask my students to analyse concepts that I teach from multiple competing perspectives.”
• “I help my students to develop metacognitive skills so they can reflect on their own learning and identify ways they can learn more effectively and efficiently.”

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8. You Support Authentic Learning Experiences

• “My credo is to prioritize authentic learning situations where students learn through solving real-world problems. In this way, I help my students understand the connection between what they’re learning and life beyond the four walls of the classroom.”

“I believe students learn best when they learn in authentic contexts. By learning through real-world problem solving, they discover the value in knowledge.”

• “To me, students should learn through experience. I aim to create experiences in the classroom that are as authentic as possible to mimic real-life application of knowledge.”

9. You Embrace Social Learning

• “I encourage students to learn in groups because I believe conversation with others helps students to express, challenge and refine their thought processes. By listening to peers, students can also hear new perspectives that may broaden their horizons and deepen their own knowledge.”

“I follow a sociocultural teaching philosophy inspired by Lev Vygotsky. This philosophy is heavily focused on having students communicate with “ more knowledgeable others ” and learn challenging but achievable tasks that are within their “Zone of Proximal Development”.

• “I embrace a situated learning theory approach to teaching. This theory emphasizes the importance of learning from experts in the contexts in which learning is applied. To this end, I encourage students to take up apprenticeships and go on many field trips so my students can learn by working with professionals.”

10. You Emphasize Communication Skills

• “In the 21st Century, it is more important than ever for students to develop effective communication skills. I help students develop communication skills such as teamwork, negotiation and self-expression in every lesson through the consistent use of guided group work lessons.”

“Students need to become clear and confident communicators of their knowledge. I often create assessments that require students to express themselves in written and verbal formats to help them develop their communication capacities.”

• “Communication skills are vital for students to become effective self-advocates. I aim to teach students to become confident communicators by giving ample opportunities to work in groups, report their research to their classmates, and perform in front of their families.”

11. You Create Inquiry and Problem Based Learning Lessons

• “I embrace an inquiry based learning approach whereby I start with a higher-order thinking question and students come up with hypotheses for answering the questions. Through this approach, students exercise skills like ‘predicting’ and ‘testing’ to seek knowledge.”

“I focus on problem based learning experiences where students are presented with a problem that they need to overcome. In overcoming the problems, students must use research skills to figure out solutions and apply them to their scenarios.”

• “I encourage students to use scientific methods to solve problems. Through scientific inquiry, students do not simply learn new information, but learn how to go about seeking truths through accurate and reliable testing methods.”

12. Mention your Assessment Style

• “I use creative assessment practices that go beyond standardized assessment. I like to assess students’ practical applications of knowledge rather than simply their written knowledge of information. When students are assessed on their practical skills, they focus on how to put knowledge into action and reaching mastery of their content.”

“I have a strong focus on formative assessment so that I have a finger on the pulse of my students’ progress. I do not shy away from altering my teaching following formative assessments to ensure my students do not fall through the gaps.”

• “Assessment is important to me as a teacher because it helps me to measure my own teaching efficacy. I often use students’ assessment results to reflect upon how I taught the content, what areas of weakness appeared across a cohort, and how to teach to those areas of weakness more effectively in years to come.”

13. You Motivate Your Students

• “I believe students learn best when they are intrinsically motivated . I therefore focus on creating lessons that are engaging, relevant to my students’ real lives, and encourage active discovery.”
• “To motivate my students, I aim to tie my lessons to their interests and hobbies. This requires me to build strong rapport and relationships with my students so I know how I can tailor my lessons for them.”

“Students who are motivated and inspired to learn will come to school with a positive mindset. I work hard to promote student self-motivation by giving them agency to explore areas of interest within the curriculum.”

• “I believe motivated students are engaged, spend more time on task, and cause less disruption to their peers. I therefore work hard to motivate students by modelling an inspired, positive outlook to education every day.

14. Education is Important to You

• “Education is the foundation for a child’s future. As a teacher, I take pride in my profession as someone who shepherds the future generations. To do this effectively, I strive to …”

“Teaching is one of the most important professions in the world. Teachers need to work hard to produce ethically and critically thinking leaders of tomorrow…”

• “It is a great pleasure to work every day to help raise confident future citizens who will solve the problems of the future. Education is incredibly important for all students’ futures. …”

15. You Promote Play-Based Learning

• “I use a play-based learning approach in my early years classroom. I follow Froebel’s approach that states “play is the highest form of learning”. Play help students learn through trial-and-error, discovery and exploration.”

“When students learn by doing rather than listening, they tend to store information in their minds more effectively. This is why I use a play-based learning approach. I create play-based learning situations where students can play in parallel , learn from one another, and make new discoveries through the use of all their senses.”

• “I encourage cooperative play in my classrooms so that my students can learn with and from one another. By playing together, young children develop important communication and group work skills. Furthermore, they can pick up new information and ways of playing from friends which can enhance their cognitive development.”

16. You Incorporate Educational Technologies

• “I am competent with 21st century technologies and use them regularly in my teaching. I believe technology is deeply important for students as it is a requirement for most jobs of the 21st Century.”

“Through the use of technology, I encourage students to learn from, research about and engage with the world around them. The internet, in particular, is an excellent pedagogical resource for students to learn.”

• “While I regularly use technology in the classroom, I first reflect on how to use technology to help extend learning. I see technology as a ‘ cognitive tool ’ that shouldn’t be used just as a gimmick. Rather, I use technology when it can help students to extend their thinking and learn more than if they hadn’t had technology in the lessons.”

17. Mention your Classroom Management Style

• “I believe classroom and behavior management is about ensuring students are focused on their learning materials. My first step for classroom management is to make my lessons engaging and motivating. I find that this is the best way to minimize disruptions and promote learning.”

“Following the assertive discipline theory, I believe strong classroom management skills are essential. Disruptive students violate the rights of other students to learn, so I ensure classes are controlled and ordered at all time to protect well-behaved students’ rights to a positive learning space.”

• “I employ an authoritative approach to classroom management. This authoritative style focuses on gaining respect and rapport from students by being firm but fair at all times and ensuring all students know I have their best interests at heart.”

To go deeper on this, see: List of Classroom Management Styles

Final Thoughts

Your teaching philosophy statement needs to be your own. It should reflect your own personality and approach to education.

The above teaching philosophy statement examples give you a good idea about the sorts of things you can start talking about in your teaching philosophy.

Follow-up your statements of beliefs with examples from your own practice.

You might also want to zoom-in on subject-specific approaches . If you are writing a teaching philosophy as a Mathematics teacher, for example, you will need to narrow down on specifically how you teach math.

Aim for your teaching philosophy statement to be a maximum of two pages long and ensure it shows both your personality and your knowledge of pedagogy skills or learning theories .

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 17 Behaviorism Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 25 Positive Psychology Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 15 Animism Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 10 Magical Thinking Examples

6 thoughts on “59 Teaching Philosophy Statement Examples”

This is very helpful. I appreciate the wide variety of examples as well as the final thoughts at the end. Yet, did you mean, “59 Teaching Philosophy Statement Examples” (rather than 57)?

Two bonus ones 🙂 I think you’re the first person to have counted the list! I updated the title to 59.

Thanks! Chris

Very inspiring and insightful. It really helped me a lot in my studies. Looking forward for more.

Thank you Chris.

Great insight, as a basketball coach and athletic director of my youth football program I agree with mostly all of your points. As an ELA teacher it is easy to implement a lot of my coaching qualities into my teaching. Just as in the classroom students are on different skill levels while also learning and comprehending information differently. Providing skills base learning within the lesson is a much better approach instead of continuing to drill skills over and over. A lot of students may lose interest in the activity due to that skills approach. Do you believe a skills-based approach would also benefit students in the classroom

Hi Chris, This is very informative indeed.Thank you. Regards, Chamila

Thank you for a very informative materials shared and it’s a very helpful to me, I learned and refreshed from this. I love to read , review and apply this in my classroom.

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Teaching Philosophies in Education

A teaching philosophy is a teacher’s set of beliefs about their role and the goals of education. It’s like a teacher’s personal rule book for how to do their job. It influences how they teach, make important choices, and work with everyone at the school. A teaching philosophy isn’t just a fancy thought—it helps teachers do their best in the classroom.

If we take a step back, think of the term teaching philosophy like this: Imagine you’re on a big journey. Before you start, you need to know why you’re going, what you want to discover, and how you’ll go about it. That’s what a teaching philosophy does for teachers. It’s like their compass and roadmap, explaining why they’re teaching, what they hope their students will learn, and how they’re going to teach it.

How to Guide: Teachers create their teaching philosophy by thinking about their own school days, what they want students to achieve, the responsibilities they have, and by looking at what other smart people have said about education. They might write all this down in a statement that acts like a reminder to keep their teaching on track with their beliefs and goals.

There are several different types of teaching philosophies that teachers might follow:

• Progressivism : Teachers who follow this philosophy believe education should help grow every part of a student, not just their brain. They use hands-on activities and make lessons feel connected to the real world.
• Essentialism: Here, the teacher is like the boss of the classroom and focuses on teaching students a must-know set of knowledge , often sticking to traditional subjects.
• Perennialism: It’s a bit like essentialism, but it puts more weight on big ideas and thinking skills rather than just knowing facts. These teachers want students to think deeply about important, timeless questions.
• Reconstructionism: Teachers with this philosophy use the classroom to help make the world better. They push students to think critically and question how society works, aiming to improve it.
• Existentialism : This philosophy is all about the student. What they need, want, and are interested in comes first, instead of just following a fixed academic program.

Examples of Teaching Philosophies In Education

Now let’s look at some examples and why they fit their philosophy:

• A progressivist teacher might have students design a garden that also helps the local wildlife. This shows progressivism because it’s hands-on and connects learning to real-life issues.
• An essentialist teacher might spend several lessons on classic literature to make sure students understand these important texts. This is essentialism because they’re focusing on core knowledge.
• A perennialist teacher might host debates on whether heroes from old stories acted rightly. This is perennialism because students have to use their thinking skills on timeless questions.
• A reconstructivist teacher might help students set up a program to tackle bullying in their school. This shows reconstructionism because it’s about making a positive change in society.
• An existentialist teacher might let students enjoy a “free reading” period where they can pick any book they like. This is existentialism since it honors students’ personal choices.

Why Is It Important?

A clear teaching philosophy is the backbone that supports many things a teacher does:

It makes sure teachers keep to their personal teaching style and create a place where learning is fun and effective. It guides choices around how to teach, check students’ understanding, and how to talk and listen to students. It lets teachers explain their teaching ways to parents, bosses, and other teachers.

Also, when a teacher knows their teaching philosophy well, it can guide them in growing as a teacher by pointing out which skills they want to get better at. Plus, it adds to their sense of who they are as a teacher and what makes their job rewarding.

Imagine if you’re trying to get better at a sport or a hobby. Knowing why you love it and what your goals are makes it easier to improve and keeps it enjoyable. That’s what a teaching philosophy does for teachers.

The idea of teaching philosophies has been shaped over time by some very thoughtful people and changes in how we teach. For example, John Locke thought education could shape a person, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau said we should focus on how kids naturally grow and learn. Their thinking is a big part of today’s teaching philosophies.

More modern people like John Dewey added new ideas too. Dewey said that learning should matter to students’ everyday lives and that schools should be about more than just book-learning.

Controversies

There are disagreements when it comes to teaching philosophies. Some people argue over whether a traditional style of teaching is better or if we should try newer, more open ways. They can’t agree on how much power teachers should have, what knowledge is essential, and if a student’s interests should be part of learning.

Another debate is whether teachers should talk about societal issues in class. Some believe that schools should just focus on academics, while others think preparing students to tackle big world problems is also a teacher’s job.

Lastly, people don’t see eye-to-eye on the best way to check if teaching is effective and students are learning. There’s a lot of debate about standardized tests and whether they are a fair way to measure education.

Related Topics

Teaching philosophies connect to some other big ideas in education like:

• Differentiated Instruction: This is about teachers changing how they teach so that each student can learn in the way that’s best for them. It’s related to teaching philosophies because how a teacher views learning will shape how they use differentiated instruction.
• Classroom Management: This involves how teachers keep their classroom running smoothly. Their teaching philosophy can affect how strict they are or how they deal with challenges in class.
• Educational Psychology: This is the study of how people learn. A teacher’s philosophy will be influenced by what they believe about learning and thinking, which is part of educational psychology.

To wrap it up, a teaching philosophy is a big deal in education. It’s about a teacher’s beliefs on why they teach, the best way to help students learn, and what they think is most important in their job. Knowing one’s teaching philosophy helps teach with purpose and benefits students in their learning journey.

While every teacher’s philosophy is a personal thing, learning about the different types can help new teachers start off well or experienced teachers try new things. As the world changes, so do teaching philosophies, and with that, the way we think about teaching and learning evolves too.

Model of a Personal Philosophy for Special Education Teachers

• Carol Lee McCulloch
• Categories : Teaching methods, tips & strategies
• Tags : Teaching methods, tools & strategies

Definition of a Teaching Statement

Though some define a personal philosophy statement for teachers in more depth, the basic definition is simply a written st

atement of a teacher’s core beliefs about classroom practices, along with that teacher’s personal vision for students. The word “personal” is important because students, parents and fellow professionals want to know how the teacher’s intellect, academic training and heart play into his or her plans for guiding a new generation of learners.

Getting Started

Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching has developed some great general guidelines for beginning the statement process. Among them are the following:

Make your statement brief and well written, one to two pages typically for hiring purposes.

Use a first-person narrative approach that allows for personal and reflective input.

Be sincere and unique, using a couple of concrete examples that will help the reader visualize you in the classroom.

Be discipline-specific and avoid jargon or technical terms that can be off-putting to some readers.

Be humble; mention students in an enthusiastic and not a condescending way, and illustrate a willingness to learn from them and other colleagues.

Revise–teaching is an evolving process and teaching statements need to be changed periodically.

In addition, reflection questions that are good to ask yourself before writing the statement are:

Why do I want to teach special needs students?

Why do I teach the way I do?

What should my students and their parents expect of me as a teacher?

What specific activities or exercises will I use to engage my students?

What do I want my students to learn and how will I know my goals for them are being met?

What is my feeling about inclusive teaching or mainstreaming my special education students?

This kind of brainstorming brings front and center why special education is a “true calling.”

Statement Styles May Vary

Since the statement of philosophy is your personal philosophy, the writing style should fit you! According to Shelly L. Smith, Ph.D., with the University of Minnesota’s Instructional Development Services, “there is no required content or format…no right or wrong…which is why it is so challenging for most people.” She says that one may choose to write in prose, use famous quotes, create visuals or use a question/answer format. Some teachers prefer a simple step-by-step format in which they write a short introduction sharing key information about themselves and then begin to use points to illustrate their teaching philosophy.

The Annikeris Resource Website shares this excerpt from a touching example of a special ed teaching philosophy statement. The statement was actually a beautiful picture drawn in pen and ink encompassing a collage of nearly a dozen pictures showing a teacher in different situations: reading children a story, comforting a crying student, bringing a student to the school nurse, grading assignments as the clock neared 5:00, etc. At the bottom of the drawing there was a simple caption that read: TUESDAY. That teacher’s philosophy detailed perfectly the many roles a special ed teacher–and other teachers–must assume everyday, and it was one that made quite an impression!

Bottom line: Choose the technique that you are most comfortable with and use it to express your values and vision as a special education teacher. And remember to check out the many resources available online and at university and public libraries. They offer numerous styles, samples and other valuable teaching aids.

Ohio State University. Writing a Philosophy of Teaching Statement .

Annikeris: A Resource for Students, Teachers and Parents .

Image Credits: Morguefile.com by: Puravida and Dave

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What I’ve Learned From Special Ed Teachers

Special education teachers have valuable insights to share with their peers about patience, empathy, working with parents, and more.

Special education teachers are expected to do quite a lot: Assess students’ skills to determine their needs and then develop teaching plans; organize and assign activities that are specific to each student’s abilities; teach and mentor students as a class, in small groups, and one-on-one; and write individualized education plans in parent-friendly language.

In addition, they must know and apply the dozens of acronyms used in their field: ADA (American with Disabilities Act), DOR (Department of Rehabilitation), LEA (local education agency), PDD (pervasive developmental disorder), and LRE (least restrictive environment), to name just a few.

As I work with special education teachers, I remain awestruck by their energy, empathy, and excitement. Here’s what I’ve learned from them that has made me a better teacher.

1. Accept every student as they are. Students come to us with packages and baggage. Open and unpack slowly and gently, with kindness, respect, and understanding. Building a relationship with a student takes time and patience—allow it to happen organically. If you push it, shove it, or force it, you’ll have to start all over and it may or may not bloom.

2. Active listening is a gift. Every day, every student will have a problem—or something they perceive to be a problem. Stop, make eye contact, and listen. Don’t offer a solution until invited to do so. Don’t minimize their problem, experience, or situation. Don’t take their problem to the principal or other administrator until you’ve given the student time to think it through. Sometimes all they want is to be heard.

3. Scaffolding a lesson is just good teaching. Be prepared to break down a lesson and create pieces of learning. When each piece is explained, modeled, practiced, and applied, the parts fit together solidly to form a whole of understanding. Too much lecturing, too thick a packet, or too many directions can cause anxiety and disquiet. One small step at a time usually works best.

4. Be specific when sharing information with parents. When talking with parents, offer specific positives and exact concerns about their child’s abilities. Be careful of generalizations like always, never, usually, and sometimes. Give explicit examples and partner with parents to create opportunities for growth. Parents want to support teachers—show them how.

5. Eliminate jargon when talking with parents. Remember all those acronyms? If they must be used, use them sparingly and define each one. Acronyms can aid teachers in communicating with each other, but they build a divide with parents because using them is exclusionary—they’re a special language for educators. Building a partnership with parents means having a common vocabulary that inspires, not tires.

6. Students want to feel loved. Our students want to believe they’re the only ones in our class, on our caseload, or in our hearts. A small token of appreciation—a handwritten note, a quiet teacher-student lunch, or our cell phone number—tells that student we care about them and their academics. The importance of building relationships cannot be overstressed—students need us to show them that love is always possible.

7. Share what we’ve learned with others. Sharing resources and strategies with other teachers advances our students’ learning. Special education teachers are experts in the philosophy of differentiation. They don’t simply do differentiation—they employ it as a mindset needed to teach well. Demonstrating for one student how to apply a strategy will benefit all students.

8. Patience is a gift, a virtue, and a necessity. All of our students require patience, but some need a little more than others. Giving extra time for homework or a differentiated assessment could alleviate some of that challenge. Always remember that parents send to us their most precious possessions, hoping we’ll be humble, supportive, and empathetic.

9. Ask for help. Do not assume that you can teach, nurture, feed, clothe, and shelter every student on your caseload or in your class. Before you jeopardize your physical, emotional, and mental health, it’s important to ask for support. Your colleagues, school social worker, school psychologist, and other support staff are ready to help you help your students.

10. Laugh. There are some days when laughter might be the last thing you’re thinking of, but it may just be what you need. Our students come to us from different places—cognitively and logistically—yet a hearty chuckle or shared case of the giggles may help all of us take a step back and start again.

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Philosophy of Education

Philosophy of education is the branch of applied or practical philosophy concerned with the nature and aims of education and the philosophical problems arising from educational theory and practice. Because that practice is ubiquitous in and across human societies, its social and individual manifestations so varied, and its influence so profound, the subject is wide-ranging, involving issues in ethics and social/political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, and other areas of philosophy. Because it looks both inward to the parent discipline and outward to educational practice and the social, legal, and institutional contexts in which it takes place, philosophy of education concerns itself with both sides of the traditional theory/practice divide. Its subject matter includes both basic philosophical issues (e.g., the nature of the knowledge worth teaching, the character of educational equality and justice, etc.) and problems concerning specific educational policies and practices (e.g., the desirability of standardized curricula and testing, the social, economic, legal and moral dimensions of specific funding arrangements, the justification of curriculum decisions, etc.). In all this the philosopher of education prizes conceptual clarity, argumentative rigor, the fair-minded consideration of the interests of all involved in or affected by educational efforts and arrangements, and informed and well-reasoned valuation of educational aims and interventions.

Philosophy of education has a long and distinguished history in the Western philosophical tradition, from Socrates’ battles with the sophists to the present day. Many of the most distinguished figures in that tradition incorporated educational concerns into their broader philosophical agendas (Curren 2000, 2018; Rorty 1998). While that history is not the focus here, it is worth noting that the ideals of reasoned inquiry championed by Socrates and his descendants have long informed the view that education should foster in all students, to the extent possible, the disposition to seek reasons and the ability to evaluate them cogently, and to be guided by their evaluations in matters of belief, action and judgment. This view, that education centrally involves the fostering of reason or rationality, has with varying articulations and qualifications been embraced by most of those historical figures; it continues to be defended by contemporary philosophers of education as well (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2007, 2017). As with any philosophical thesis it is controversial; some dimensions of the controversy are explored below.

This entry is a selective survey of important contemporary work in Anglophone philosophy of education; it does not treat in detail recent scholarship outside that context.

1. Problems in Delineating the Field

2. analytic philosophy of education and its influence, 3.1 the content of the curriculum and the aims and functions of schooling, 3.2 social, political and moral philosophy, 3.3 social epistemology, virtue epistemology, and the epistemology of education, 3.4 philosophical disputes concerning empirical education research, 4. concluding remarks, other internet resources, related entries.

The inward/outward looking nature of the field of philosophy of education alluded to above makes the task of delineating the field, of giving an over-all picture of the intellectual landscape, somewhat complicated (for a detailed account of this topography, see Phillips 1985, 2010). Suffice it to say that some philosophers, as well as focusing inward on the abstract philosophical issues that concern them, are drawn outwards to discuss or comment on issues that are more commonly regarded as falling within the purview of professional educators, educational researchers, policy-makers and the like. (An example is Michael Scriven, who in his early career was a prominent philosopher of science; later he became a central figure in the development of the field of evaluation of educational and social programs. See Scriven 1991a, 1991b.) At the same time, there are professionals in the educational or closely related spheres who are drawn to discuss one or another of the philosophical issues that they encounter in the course of their work. (An example here is the behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner, the central figure in the development of operant conditioning and programmed learning, who in works such as Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1972) grappled—albeit controversially—with major philosophical issues that were related to his work.)

What makes the field even more amorphous is the existence of works on educational topics, written by well-regarded philosophers who have made major contributions to their discipline; these educational reflections have little or no philosophical content, illustrating the truth that philosophers do not always write philosophy. However, despite this, works in this genre have often been treated as contributions to philosophy of education. (Examples include John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education [1693] and Bertrand Russell’s rollicking pieces written primarily to raise funds to support a progressive school he ran with his wife. (See Park 1965.)

Finally, as indicated earlier, the domain of education is vast, the issues it raises are almost overwhelmingly numerous and are of great complexity, and the social significance of the field is second to none. These features make the phenomena and problems of education of great interest to a wide range of socially-concerned intellectuals, who bring with them their own favored conceptual frameworks—concepts, theories and ideologies, methods of analysis and argumentation, metaphysical and other assumptions, and the like. It is not surprising that scholars who work in this broad genre also find a home in the field of philosophy of education.

As a result of these various factors, the significant intellectual and social trends of the past few centuries, together with the significant developments in philosophy, all have had an impact on the content of arguments and methods of argumentation in philosophy of education—Marxism, psycho-analysis, existentialism, phenomenology, positivism, post-modernism, pragmatism, neo-liberalism, the several waves of feminism, analytic philosophy in both its ordinary language and more formal guises, are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Conceptual analysis, careful assessment of arguments, the rooting out of ambiguity, the drawing of clarifying distinctions—all of which are at least part of the philosophical toolkit—have been respected activities within philosophy from the dawn of the field. No doubt it somewhat over-simplifies the complex path of intellectual history to suggest that what happened in the twentieth century—early on, in the home discipline itself, and with a lag of a decade or more in philosophy of education—is that philosophical analysis came to be viewed by some scholars as being the major philosophical activity (or set of activities), or even as being the only viable or reputable activity. In any case, as they gained prominence and for a time hegemonic influence during the rise of analytic philosophy early in the twentieth century analytic techniques came to dominate philosophy of education in the middle third of that century (Curren, Robertson, & Hager 2003).

The pioneering work in the modern period entirely in an analytic mode was the short monograph by C.D. Hardie, Truth and Fallacy in Educational Theory (1941; reissued in 1962). In his Introduction, Hardie (who had studied with C.D. Broad and I.A. Richards) made it clear that he was putting all his eggs into the ordinary-language-analysis basket:

The Cambridge analytical school, led by Moore, Broad and Wittgenstein, has attempted so to analyse propositions that it will always be apparent whether the disagreement between philosophers is one concerning matters of fact, or is one concerning the use of words, or is, as is frequently the case, a purely emotive one. It is time, I think, that a similar attitude became common in the field of educational theory. (Hardie 1962: xix)

About a decade after the end of the Second World War the floodgates opened and a stream of work in the analytic mode appeared; the following is merely a sample. D. J. O’Connor published An Introduction to Philosophy of Education (1957) in which, among other things, he argued that the word “theory” as it is used in educational contexts is merely a courtesy title, for educational theories are nothing like what bear this title in the natural sciences. Israel Scheffler, who became the paramount philosopher of education in North America, produced a number of important works including The Language of Education (1960), which contained clarifying and influential analyses of definitions (he distinguished reportive, stipulative, and programmatic types) and the logic of slogans (often these are literally meaningless, and, he argued, should be seen as truncated arguments), Conditions of Knowledge (1965), still the best introduction to the epistemological side of philosophy of education, and Reason and Teaching (1973 [1989]), which in a wide-ranging and influential series of essays makes the case for regarding the fostering of rationality/critical thinking as a fundamental educational ideal (cf. Siegel 2016). B. O. Smith and R. H. Ennis edited the volume Language and Concepts in Education (1961); and R.D. Archambault edited Philosophical Analysis and Education (1965), consisting of essays by a number of prominent British writers, most notably R. S. Peters (whose status in Britain paralleled that of Scheffler in the United States), Paul Hirst, and John Wilson. Topics covered in the Archambault volume were typical of those that became the “bread and butter” of analytic philosophy of education (APE) throughout the English-speaking world—education as a process of initiation, liberal education, the nature of knowledge, types of teaching, and instruction versus indoctrination.

Among the most influential products of APE was the analysis developed by Hirst and Peters (1970) and Peters (1973) of the concept of education itself. Using as a touchstone “normal English usage,” it was concluded that a person who has been educated (rather than instructed or indoctrinated) has been (i) changed for the better; (ii) this change has involved the acquisition of knowledge and intellectual skills and the development of understanding; and (iii) the person has come to care for, or be committed to, the domains of knowledge and skill into which he or she has been initiated. The method used by Hirst and Peters comes across clearly in their handling of the analogy with the concept of “reform”, one they sometimes drew upon for expository purposes. A criminal who has been reformed has changed for the better, and has developed a commitment to the new mode of life (if one or other of these conditions does not hold, a speaker of standard English would not say the criminal has been reformed). Clearly the analogy with reform breaks down with respect to the knowledge and understanding conditions. Elsewhere Peters developed the fruitful notion of “education as initiation”.

The concept of indoctrination was also of great interest to analytic philosophers of education, for, it was argued, getting clear about precisely what constitutes indoctrination also would serve to clarify the border that demarcates it from acceptable educational processes. Thus, whether or not an instructional episode was a case of indoctrination was determined by the content taught, the intention of the instructor, the methods of instruction used, the outcomes of the instruction, or by some combination of these. Adherents of the different analyses used the same general type of argument to make their case, namely, appeal to normal and aberrant usage. Unfortunately, ordinary language analysis did not lead to unanimity of opinion about where this border was located, and rival analyses of the concept were put forward (Snook 1972). The danger of restricting analysis to ordinary language (“normal English usage”) was recognized early on by Scheffler, whose preferred view of analysis emphasized

first, its greater sophistication as regards language, and the interpenetration of language and inquiry, second, its attempt to follow the modern example of the sciences in empirical spirit, in rigor, in attention to detail, in respect for alternatives, and in objectivity of method, and third, its use of techniques of symbolic logic brought to full development only in the last fifty years… It is…this union of scientific spirit and logical method applied toward the clarification of basic ideas that characterizes current analytic philosophy [and that ought to characterize analytic philosophy of education]. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 9–10])

After a period of dominance, for a number of important reasons the influence of APE went into decline. First, there were growing criticisms that the work of analytic philosophers of education had become focused upon minutiae and in the main was bereft of practical import. (It is worth noting that a 1966 article in Time , reprinted in Lucas 1969, had put forward the same criticism of mainstream philosophy.) Second, in the early 1970’s radical students in Britain accused Peters’ brand of linguistic analysis of conservatism, and of tacitly giving support to “traditional values”—they raised the issue of whose English usage was being analyzed?

Third, criticisms of language analysis in mainstream philosophy had been mounting for some time, and finally after a lag of many years were reaching the attention of philosophers of education; there even had been a surprising degree of interest on the part of the general reading public in the United Kingdom as early as 1959, when Gilbert Ryle, editor of the journal Mind , refused to commission a review of Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things (1959)—a detailed and quite acerbic critique of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and its espousal of ordinary language analysis. (Ryle argued that Gellner’s book was too insulting, a view that drew Bertrand Russell into the fray on Gellner’s side—in the daily press, no less; Russell produced a list of insulting remarks drawn from the work of great philosophers of the past. See Mehta 1963.)

Richard Peters had been given warning that all was not well with APE at a conference in Canada in 1966; after delivering a paper on “The aims of education: A conceptual inquiry” that was based on ordinary language analysis, a philosopher in the audience (William Dray) asked Peters “ whose concepts do we analyze?” Dray went on to suggest that different people, and different groups within society, have different concepts of education. Five years before the radical students raised the same issue, Dray pointed to the possibility that what Peters had presented under the guise of a “logical analysis” was nothing but the favored usage of a certain class of persons—a class that Peters happened to identify with (see Peters 1973, where to the editor’s credit the interaction with Dray is reprinted).

Fourth, during the decade of the seventies when these various critiques of analytic philosophy were in the process of eroding its luster, a spate of translations from the Continent stimulated some philosophers of education in Britain and North America to set out in new directions, and to adopt a new style of writing and argumentation. Key works by Gadamer, Foucault and Derrida appeared in English, and these were followed in 1984 by Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition . The classic works of Heidegger and Husserl also found new admirers; and feminist philosophers of education were finding their voices—Maxine Greene published a number of pieces in the 1970s and 1980s, including The Dialectic of Freedom (1988); the influential book by Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , appeared the same year as the work by Lyotard, followed a year later by Jane Roland Martin’s Reclaiming a Conversation . In more recent years all these trends have continued. APE was and is no longer the center of interest, although, as indicated below, it still retains its voice.

3. Areas of Contemporary Activity

As was stressed at the outset, the field of education is huge and contains within it a virtually inexhaustible number of issues that are of philosophical interest. To attempt comprehensive coverage of how philosophers of education have been working within this thicket would be a quixotic task for a large single volume and is out of the question for a solitary encyclopedia entry. Nevertheless, a valiant attempt to give an overview was made in A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Curren 2003), which contains more than six-hundred pages divided into forty-five chapters each of which surveys a subfield of work. The following random selection of chapter topics gives a sense of the enormous scope of the field: Sex education, special education, science education, aesthetic education, theories of teaching and learning, religious education, knowledge, truth and learning, cultivating reason, the measurement of learning, multicultural education, education and the politics of identity, education and standards of living, motivation and classroom management, feminism, critical theory, postmodernism, romanticism, the purposes of universities, affirmative action in higher education, and professional education. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education (Siegel 2009) contains a similarly broad range of articles on (among other things) the epistemic and moral aims of education, liberal education and its imminent demise, thinking and reasoning, fallibilism and fallibility, indoctrination, authenticity, the development of rationality, Socratic teaching, educating the imagination, caring and empathy in moral education, the limits of moral education, the cultivation of character, values education, curriculum and the value of knowledge, education and democracy, art and education, science education and religious toleration, constructivism and scientific methods, multicultural education, prejudice, authority and the interests of children, and on pragmatist, feminist, and postmodernist approaches to philosophy of education.

Given this enormous range, there is no non-arbitrary way to select a small number of topics for further discussion, nor can the topics that are chosen be pursued in great depth. The choice of those below has been made with an eye to highlighting contemporary work that makes solid contact with and contributes to important discussions in general philosophy and/or the academic educational and educational research communities.

The issue of what should be taught to students at all levels of education—the issue of curriculum content—obviously is a fundamental one, and it is an extraordinarily difficult one with which to grapple. In tackling it, care needs to be taken to distinguish between education and schooling—for although education can occur in schools, so can mis-education, and many other things can take place there that are educationally orthogonal (such as the provision of free or subsidized lunches and the development of social networks); and it also must be recognized that education can occur in the home, in libraries and museums, in churches and clubs, in solitary interaction with the public media, and the like.

In developing a curriculum (whether in a specific subject area, or more broadly as the whole range of offerings in an educational institution or system), a number of difficult decisions need to be made. Issues such as the proper ordering or sequencing of topics in the chosen subject, the time to be allocated to each topic, the lab work or excursions or projects that are appropriate for particular topics, can all be regarded as technical issues best resolved either by educationists who have a depth of experience with the target age group or by experts in the psychology of learning and the like. But there are deeper issues, ones concerning the validity of the justifications that have been given for including/excluding particular subjects or topics in the offerings of formal educational institutions. (Why should evolution or creation “science” be included, or excluded, as a topic within the standard high school subject Biology? Is the justification that is given for teaching Economics in some schools coherent and convincing? Do the justifications for including/excluding materials on birth control, patriotism, the Holocaust or wartime atrocities in the curriculum in some school districts stand up to critical scrutiny?)

The different justifications for particular items of curriculum content that have been put forward by philosophers and others since Plato’s pioneering efforts all draw, explicitly or implicitly, upon the positions that the respective theorists hold about at least three sets of issues.

First, what are the aims and/or functions of education (aims and functions are not necessarily the same)? Many aims have been proposed; a short list includes the production of knowledge and knowledgeable students, the fostering of curiosity and inquisitiveness, the enhancement of understanding, the enlargement of the imagination, the civilizing of students, the fostering of rationality and/or autonomy, and the development in students of care, concern and associated dispositions and attitudes (see Siegel 2007 for a longer list). The justifications offered for all such aims have been controversial, and alternative justifications of a single proposed aim can provoke philosophical controversy. Consider the aim of autonomy. Aristotle asked, what constitutes the good life and/or human flourishing, such that education should foster these (Curren 2013)? These two formulations are related, for it is arguable that our educational institutions should aim to equip individuals to pursue this good life—although this is not obvious, both because it is not clear that there is one conception of the good or flourishing life that is the good or flourishing life for everyone, and it is not clear that this is a question that should be settled in advance rather than determined by students for themselves. Thus, for example, if our view of human flourishing includes the capacity to think and act autonomously, then the case can be made that educational institutions—and their curricula—should aim to prepare, or help to prepare, autonomous individuals. A rival justification of the aim of autonomy, associated with Kant, champions the educational fostering of autonomy not on the basis of its contribution to human flourishing, but rather the obligation to treat students with respect as persons (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988). Still others urge the fostering of autonomy on the basis of students’ fundamental interests, in ways that draw upon both Aristotelian and Kantian conceptual resources (Brighouse 2005, 2009). It is also possible to reject the fostering of autonomy as an educational aim (Hand 2006).

Assuming that the aim can be justified, how students should be helped to become autonomous or develop a conception of the good life and pursue it is of course not immediately obvious, and much philosophical ink has been spilled on the general question of how best to determine curriculum content. One influential line of argument was developed by Paul Hirst, who argued that knowledge is essential for developing and then pursuing a conception of the good life, and because logical analysis shows, he argued, that there are seven basic forms of knowledge, the case can be made that the function of the curriculum is to introduce students to each of these forms (Hirst 1965; see Phillips 1987: ch. 11). Another, suggested by Scheffler, is that curriculum content should be selected so as “to help the learner attain maximum self-sufficiency as economically as possible.” The relevant sorts of economy include those of resources, teacher effort, student effort, and the generalizability or transfer value of content, while the self-sufficiency in question includes

self-awareness, imaginative weighing of alternative courses of action, understanding of other people’s choices and ways of life, decisiveness without rigidity, emancipation from stereotyped ways of thinking and perceiving…empathy… intuition, criticism and independent judgment. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 123–5])

Both impose important constraints on the curricular content to be taught.

Second, is it justifiable to treat the curriculum of an educational institution as a vehicle for furthering the socio-political interests and goals of a dominant group, or any particular group, including one’s own; and relatedly, is it justifiable to design the curriculum so that it serves as an instrument of control or of social engineering? In the closing decades of the twentieth century there were numerous discussions of curriculum theory, particularly from Marxist and postmodern perspectives, that offered the sobering analysis that in many educational systems, including those in Western democracies, the curriculum did indeed reflect and serve the interests of powerful cultural elites. What to do about this situation (if it is indeed the situation of contemporary educational institutions) is far from clear and is the focus of much work at the interface of philosophy of education and social/political philosophy, some of which is discussed in the next section. A closely related question is this: ought educational institutions be designed to further pre-determined social ends, or rather to enable students to competently evaluate all such ends? Scheffler argued that we should opt for the latter: we must

surrender the idea of shaping or molding the mind of the pupil. The function of education…is rather to liberate the mind, strengthen its critical powers, [and] inform it with knowledge and the capacity for independent inquiry. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 139])

Third, should educational programs at the elementary and secondary levels be made up of a number of disparate offerings, so that individuals with different interests and abilities and affinities for learning can pursue curricula that are suitable? Or should every student pursue the same curriculum as far as each is able?—a curriculum, it should be noted, that in past cases nearly always was based on the needs or interests of those students who were academically inclined or were destined for elite social roles. Mortimer Adler and others in the late twentieth century sometimes used the aphorism “the best education for the best is the best education for all.”

The thinking here can be explicated in terms of the analogy of an out-of-control virulent disease, for which there is only one type of medicine available; taking a large dose of this medicine is extremely beneficial, and the hope is that taking only a little—while less effective—is better than taking none at all. Medically, this is dubious, while the educational version—forcing students to work, until they exit the system, on topics that do not interest them and for which they have no facility or motivation—has even less merit. (For a critique of Adler and his Paideia Proposal , see Noddings 2015.) It is interesting to compare the modern “one curriculum track for all” position with Plato’s system outlined in the Republic , according to which all students—and importantly this included girls—set out on the same course of study. Over time, as they moved up the educational ladder it would become obvious that some had reached the limit imposed upon them by nature, and they would be directed off into appropriate social roles in which they would find fulfillment, for their abilities would match the demands of these roles. Those who continued on with their education would eventually become members of the ruling class of Guardians.

The publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971 was the most notable event in the history of political philosophy over the last century. The book spurred a period of ferment in political philosophy that included, among other things, new research on educationally fundamental themes. The principles of justice in educational distribution have perhaps been the dominant theme in this literature, and Rawls’s influence on its development has been pervasive.

Rawls’s theory of justice made so-called “fair equality of opportunity” one of its constitutive principles. Fair equality of opportunity entailed that the distribution of education would not put the children of those who currently occupied coveted social positions at any competitive advantage over other, equally talented and motivated children seeking the qualifications for those positions (Rawls 1971: 72–75). Its purpose was to prevent socio-economic differences from hardening into social castes that were perpetuated across generations. One obvious criticism of fair equality of opportunity is that it does not prohibit an educational distribution that lavished resources on the most talented children while offering minimal opportunities to others. So long as untalented students from wealthy families were assigned opportunities no better than those available to their untalented peers among the poor, no breach of the principle would occur. Even the most moderate egalitarians might find such a distributive regime to be intuitively repugnant.

Repugnance might be mitigated somewhat by the ways in which the overall structure of Rawls’s conception of justice protects the interests of those who fare badly in educational competition. All citizens must enjoy the same basic liberties, and equal liberty always has moral priority over equal opportunity: the former can never be compromised to advance the latter. Further, inequality in the distribution of income and wealth are permitted only to the degree that it serves the interests of the least advantaged group in society. But even with these qualifications, fair equality of opportunity is arguably less than really fair to anyone. The fact that their education should secure ends other than access to the most selective social positions—ends such as artistic appreciation, the kind of self-knowledge that humanistic study can furnish, or civic virtue—is deemed irrelevant according to Rawls’s principle. But surely it is relevant, given that a principle of educational justice must be responsive to the full range of educationally important goods.

Suppose we revise our account of the goods included in educational distribution so that aesthetic appreciation, say, and the necessary understanding and virtue for conscientious citizenship count for just as much as job-related skills. An interesting implication of doing so is that the rationale for requiring equality under any just distribution becomes decreasingly clear. That is because job-related skills are positional whereas the other educational goods are not (Hollis 1982). If you and I both aspire to a career in business management for which we are equally qualified, any increase in your job-related skills is a corresponding disadvantage to me unless I can catch up. Positional goods have a competitive structure by definition, though the ends of civic or aesthetic education do not fit that structure. If you and I aspire to be good citizens and are equal in civic understanding and virtue, an advance in your civic education is no disadvantage to me. On the contrary, it is easier to be a good citizen the better other citizens learn to be. At the very least, so far as non-positional goods figure in our conception of what counts as a good education, the moral stakes of inequality are thereby lowered.

In fact, an emerging alternative to fair equality of opportunity is a principle that stipulates some benchmark of adequacy in achievement or opportunity as the relevant standard of distribution. But it is misleading to represent this as a contrast between egalitarian and sufficientarian conceptions. Philosophically serious interpretations of adequacy derive from the ideal of equal citizenship (Satz 2007; Anderson 2007). Then again, fair equality of opportunity in Rawls’s theory is derived from a more fundamental ideal of equality among citizens. This was arguably true in A Theory of Justice but it is certainly true in his later work (Dworkin 1977: 150–183; Rawls 1993). So, both Rawls’s principle and the emerging alternative share an egalitarian foundation. The debate between adherents of equal opportunity and those misnamed as sufficientarians is certainly not over (e.g., Brighouse & Swift 2009; Jacobs 2010; Warnick 2015). Further progress will likely hinge on explicating the most compelling conception of the egalitarian foundation from which distributive principles are to be inferred. Another Rawls-inspired alternative is that a “prioritarian” distribution of achievement or opportunity might turn out to be the best principle we can come up with—i.e., one that favors the interests of the least advantaged students (Schouten 2012).

The publication of Rawls’s Political Liberalism in 1993 signaled a decisive turning point in his thinking about justice. In his earlier book, the theory of justice had been presented as if it were universally valid. But Rawls had come to think that any theory of justice presented as such was open to reasonable rejection. A more circumspect approach to justification would seek grounds for justice as fairness in an overlapping consensus between the many reasonable values and doctrines that thrive in a democratic political culture. Rawls argued that such a culture is informed by a shared ideal of free and equal citizenship that provided a new, distinctively democratic framework for justifying a conception of justice. The shift to political liberalism involved little revision on Rawls’s part to the content of the principles he favored. But the salience it gave to questions about citizenship in the fabric of liberal political theory had important educational implications. How was the ideal of free and equal citizenship to be instantiated in education in a way that accommodated the range of reasonable values and doctrines encompassed in an overlapping consensus? Political Liberalism has inspired a range of answers to that question (cf. Callan 1997; Clayton 2006; Bull 2008).

Other philosophers besides Rawls in the 1990s took up a cluster of questions about civic education, and not always from a liberal perspective. Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue (1984) strongly influenced the development of communitarian political theory which, as its very name might suggest, argued that the cultivation of community could preempt many of the problems with conflicting individual rights at the core of liberalism. As a full-standing alternative to liberalism, communitarianism might have little to recommend it. But it was a spur for liberal philosophers to think about how communities could be built and sustained to support the more familiar projects of liberal politics (e.g., Strike 2010). Furthermore, its arguments often converged with those advanced by feminist exponents of the ethic of care (Noddings 1984; Gilligan 1982). Noddings’ work is particularly notable because she inferred a cogent and radical agenda for the reform of schools from her conception of care (Noddings 1992).

One persistent controversy in citizenship theory has been about whether patriotism is correctly deemed a virtue, given our obligations to those who are not our fellow citizens in an increasingly interdependent world and the sordid history of xenophobia with which modern nation states are associated. The controversy is partly about what we should teach in our schools and is commonly discussed by philosophers in that context (Galston 1991; Ben-Porath 2006; Callan 2006; Miller 2007; Curren & Dorn 2018). The controversy is related to a deeper and more pervasive question about how morally or intellectually taxing the best conception of our citizenship should be. The more taxing it is, the more constraining its derivative conception of civic education will be. Contemporary political philosophers offer divergent arguments about these matters. For example, Gutmann and Thompson claim that citizens of diverse democracies need to “understand the diverse ways of life of their fellow citizens” (Gutmann & Thompson 1996: 66). The need arises from the obligation of reciprocity which they (like Rawls) believe to be integral to citizenship. Because I must seek to cooperate with others politically on terms that make sense from their moral perspective as well as my own, I must be ready to enter that perspective imaginatively so as to grasp its distinctive content. Many such perspectives prosper in liberal democracies, and so the task of reciprocal understanding is necessarily onerous. Still, our actions qua deliberative citizen must be grounded in such reciprocity if political cooperation on terms acceptable to us as (diversely) morally motivated citizens is to be possible at all. This is tantamount to an imperative to think autonomously inside the role of citizen because I cannot close-mindedly resist critical consideration of moral views alien to my own without flouting my responsibilities as a deliberative citizen.

Civic education does not exhaust the domain of moral education, even though the more robust conceptions of equal citizenship have far-reaching implications for just relations in civil society and the family. The study of moral education has traditionally taken its bearings from normative ethics rather than political philosophy, and this is largely true of work undertaken in recent decades. The major development here has been the revival of virtue ethics as an alternative to the deontological and consequentialist theories that dominated discussion for much of the twentieth century.

The defining idea of virtue ethics is that our criterion of moral right and wrong must derive from a conception of how the ideally virtuous agent would distinguish between the two. Virtue ethics is thus an alternative to both consequentialism and deontology which locate the relevant criterion in producing good consequences or meeting the requirements of moral duty respectively. The debate about the comparative merits of these theories is not resolved, but from an educational perspective that may be less important than it has sometimes seemed to antagonists in the debate. To be sure, adjudicating between rival theories in normative ethics might shed light on how best to construe the process of moral education, and philosophical reflection on the process might help us to adjudicate between the theories. There has been extensive work on habituation and virtue, largely inspired by Aristotle (Burnyeat 1980; Peters 1981). But whether this does anything to establish the superiority of virtue ethics over its competitors is far from obvious. Other aspects of moral education—in particular, the paired processes of role-modelling and identification—deserve much more scrutiny than they have received (Audi 2017; Kristjánsson 2015, 2017).

Related to the issues concerning the aims and functions of education and schooling rehearsed above are those involving the specifically epistemic aims of education and attendant issues treated by social and virtue epistemologists. (The papers collected in Kotzee 2013 and Baehr 2016 highlight the current and growing interactions among social epistemologists, virtue epistemologists, and philosophers of education.)

There is, first, a lively debate concerning putative epistemic aims. Alvin Goldman argues that truth (or knowledge understood in the “weak” sense of true belief) is the fundamental epistemic aim of education (Goldman 1999). Others, including the majority of historically significant philosophers of education, hold that critical thinking or rationality and rational belief (or knowledge in the “strong” sense that includes justification) is the basic epistemic educational aim (Bailin & Siegel 2003; Scheffler 1965, 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2005, 2017). Catherine Z. Elgin (1999a,b) and Duncan Pritchard (2013, 2016; Carter & Pritchard 2017) have independently urged that understanding is the basic aim. Pritchard’s view combines understanding with intellectual virtue ; Jason Baehr (2011) systematically defends the fostering of the intellectual virtues as the fundamental epistemic aim of education. This cluster of views continues to engender ongoing discussion and debate. (Its complex literature is collected in Carter and Kotzee 2015, summarized in Siegel 2018, and helpfully analyzed in Watson 2016.)

A further controversy concerns the places of testimony and trust in the classroom: In what circumstances if any ought students to trust their teachers’ pronouncements, and why? Here the epistemology of education is informed by social epistemology, specifically the epistemology of testimony; the familiar reductionism/anti-reductionism controversy there is applicable to students and teachers. Anti-reductionists, who regard testimony as a basic source of justification, may with equanimity approve of students’ taking their teachers’ word at face value and believing what they say; reductionists may balk. Does teacher testimony itself constitute good reason for student belief?

The correct answer here seems clearly enough to be “it depends”. For very young children who have yet to acquire or develop the ability to subject teacher declarations to critical scrutiny, there seems to be little alternative to accepting what their teachers tell them. For older and more cognitively sophisticated students there seem to be more options: they can assess them for plausibility, compare them with other opinions, assess the teachers’ proffered reasons, subject them to independent evaluation, etc. Regarding “the teacher says that p ” as itself a good reason to believe it appears moreover to contravene the widely shared conviction that an important educational aim is helping students to become able to evaluate candidate beliefs for themselves and believe accordingly. That said, all sides agree that sometimes believers, including students, have good reasons simply to trust what others tell them. There is thus more work to do here by both social epistemologists and philosophers of education (for further discussion see Goldberg 2013; Siegel 2005, 2018).

A further cluster of questions, of long-standing interest to philosophers of education, concerns indoctrination : How if at all does it differ from legitimate teaching? Is it inevitable, and if so is it not always necessarily bad? First, what is it? As we saw earlier, extant analyses focus on the aims or intentions of the indoctrinator, the methods employed, or the content transmitted. If the indoctrination is successful, all have the result that students/victims either don’t, won’t, or can’t subject the indoctrinated material to proper epistemic evaluation. In this way it produces both belief that is evidentially unsupported or contravened and uncritical dispositions to believe. It might seem obvious that indoctrination, so understood, is educationally undesirable. But it equally seems that very young children, at least, have no alternative but to believe sans evidence; they have yet to acquire the dispositions to seek and evaluate evidence, or the abilities to recognize evidence or evaluate it. Thus we seem driven to the views that indoctrination is both unavoidable and yet bad and to be avoided. It is not obvious how this conundrum is best handled. One option is to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable indoctrination. Another is to distinguish between indoctrination (which is always bad) and non-indoctrinating belief inculcation, the latter being such that students are taught some things without reasons (the alphabet, the numbers, how to read and count, etc.), but in such a way that critical evaluation of all such material (and everything else) is prized and fostered (Siegel 1988: ch. 5). In the end the distinctions required by the two options might be extensionally equivalent (Siegel 2018).

Education, it is generally granted, fosters belief : in the typical propositional case, Smith teaches Jones that p , and if all goes well Jones learns it and comes to believe it. Education also has the task of fostering open-mindedness and an appreciation of our fallibility : All the theorists mentioned thus far, especially those in the critical thinking and intellectual virtue camps, urge their importance. But these two might seem at odds. If Jones (fully) believes that p , can she also be open-minded about it? Can she believe, for example, that earthquakes are caused by the movements of tectonic plates, while also believing that perhaps they aren’t? This cluster of italicized notions requires careful handling; it is helpfully discussed by Jonathan Adler (2002, 2003), who recommends regarding the latter two as meta-attitudes concerning one’s first-order beliefs rather than lessened degrees of belief or commitments to those beliefs.

Other traditional epistemological worries that impinge upon the epistemology of education concern (a) absolutism , pluralism and relativism with respect to knowledge, truth and justification as these relate to what is taught, (b) the character and status of group epistemologies and the prospects for understanding such epistemic goods “universalistically” in the face of “particularist” challenges, (c) the relation between “knowledge-how” and “knowledge-that” and their respective places in the curriculum, (d) concerns raised by multiculturalism and the inclusion/exclusion of marginalized perspectives in curriculum content and the classroom, and (e) further issues concerning teaching and learning. (There is more here than can be briefly summarized; for more references and systematic treatment cf. Bailin & Siegel 2003; Carter & Kotzee 2015; Cleverley & Phillips 1986; Robertson 2009; Siegel 2004, 2017; and Watson 2016.)

The educational research enterprise has been criticized for a century or more by politicians, policymakers, administrators, curriculum developers, teachers, philosophers of education, and by researchers themselves—but the criticisms have been contradictory. Charges of being “too ivory tower and theory-oriented” are found alongside “too focused on practice and too atheoretical”; but in light of the views of John Dewey and William James that the function of theory is to guide intelligent practice and problem-solving, it is becoming more fashionable to hold that the “theory v. practice” dichotomy is a false one. (For an illuminating account of the historical development of educational research and its tribulations, see Lagemann 2000.)

A similar trend can be discerned with respect to the long warfare between two rival groups of research methods—on one hand quantitative/statistical approaches to research, and on the other hand the qualitative/ethnographic family. (The choice of labels here is not entirely risk-free, for they have been contested; furthermore the first approach is quite often associated with “experimental” studies, and the latter with “case studies”, but this is an over-simplification.) For several decades these two rival methodological camps were treated by researchers and a few philosophers of education as being rival paradigms (Kuhn’s ideas, albeit in a very loose form, have been influential in the field of educational research), and the dispute between them was commonly referred to as “the paradigm wars”. In essence the issue at stake was epistemological: members of the quantitative/experimental camp believed that only their methods could lead to well-warranted knowledge claims, especially about the causal factors at play in educational phenomena, and on the whole they regarded qualitative methods as lacking in rigor; on the other hand the adherents of qualitative/ethnographic approaches held that the other camp was too “positivistic” and was operating with an inadequate view of causation in human affairs—one that ignored the role of motives and reasons, possession of relevant background knowledge, awareness of cultural norms, and the like. Few if any commentators in the “paradigm wars” suggested that there was anything prohibiting the use of both approaches in the one research program—provided that if both were used, they were used only sequentially or in parallel, for they were underwritten by different epistemologies and hence could not be blended together. But recently the trend has been towards rapprochement, towards the view that the two methodological families are, in fact, compatible and are not at all like paradigms in the Kuhnian sense(s) of the term; the melding of the two approaches is often called “mixed methods research”, and it is growing in popularity. (For more detailed discussion of these “wars” see Howe 2003 and Phillips 2009.)

The most lively contemporary debates about education research, however, were set in motion around the turn of the millennium when the US Federal Government moved in the direction of funding only rigorously scientific educational research—the kind that could establish causal factors which could then guide the development of practically effective policies. (It was held that such a causal knowledge base was available for medical decision-making.) The definition of “rigorously scientific”, however, was decided by politicians and not by the research community, and it was given in terms of the use of a specific research method—the net effect being that the only research projects to receive Federal funding were those that carried out randomized controlled experiments or field trials (RFTs). It has become common over the last decade to refer to the RFT as the “gold standard” methodology.

The National Research Council (NRC)—an arm of the US National Academies of Science—issued a report, influenced by postpostivistic philosophy of science (NRC 2002), that argued that this criterion was far too narrow. Numerous essays have appeared subsequently that point out how the “gold standard” account of scientific rigor distorts the history of science, how the complex nature of the relation between evidence and policy-making has been distorted and made to appear overly simple (for instance the role of value-judgments in linking empirical findings to policy directives is often overlooked), and qualitative researchers have insisted upon the scientific nature of their work. Nevertheless, and possibly because it tried to be balanced and supported the use of RFTs in some research contexts, the NRC report has been the subject of symposia in four journals, where it has been supported by a few and attacked from a variety of philosophical fronts: Its authors were positivists, they erroneously believed that educational inquiry could be value neutral and that it could ignore the ways in which the exercise of power constrains the research process, they misunderstood the nature of educational phenomena, and so on. This cluster of issues continues to be debated by educational researchers and by philosophers of education and of science, and often involves basic topics in philosophy of science: the constitution of warranting evidence, the nature of theories and of confirmation and explanation, etc. Nancy Cartwright’s important recent work on causation, evidence, and evidence-based policy adds layers of both philosophical sophistication and real world practical analysis to the central issues just discussed (Cartwright & Hardie 2012, Cartwright 2013; cf. Kvernbekk 2015 for an overview of the controversies regarding evidence in the education and philosophy of education literatures).

As stressed earlier, it is impossible to do justice to the whole field of philosophy of education in a single encyclopedia entry. Different countries around the world have their own intellectual traditions and their own ways of institutionalizing philosophy of education in the academic universe, and no discussion of any of this appears in the present essay. But even in the Anglo-American world there is such a diversity of approaches that any author attempting to produce a synoptic account will quickly run into the borders of his or her competence. Clearly this has happened in the present case.

Fortunately, in the last thirty years or so resources have become available that significantly alleviate these problems. There has been a flood of encyclopedia entries, both on the field as a whole and also on many specific topics not well-covered in the present essay (see, as a sample, Burbules 1994; Chambliss 1996b; Curren 1998, 2018; Phillips 1985, 2010; Siegel 2007; Smeyers 1994), two “Encyclopedias” (Chambliss 1996a; Phillips 2014), a “Guide” (Blake, Smeyers, Smith, & Standish 2003), a “Companion” (Curren 2003), two “Handbooks” (Siegel 2009; Bailey, Barrow, Carr, & McCarthy 2010), a comprehensive anthology (Curren 2007), a dictionary of key concepts in the field (Winch & Gingell 1999), and a good textbook or two (Carr 2003; Noddings 2015). In addition there are numerous volumes both of reprinted selections and of specially commissioned essays on specific topics, some of which were given short shrift here (for another sampling see A. Rorty 1998, Stone 1994), and several international journals, including Theory and Research in Education , Journal of Philosophy of Education , Educational Theory , Studies in Philosophy and Education , and Educational Philosophy and Theory . Thus there is more than enough material available to keep the interested reader busy.

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The authors and editors would like to thank Randall Curren for sending a number of constructive suggestions for the Summer 2018 update of this entry.

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A Guide to Special Education Terms

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The number of students in special education has increased steadily in the last four decades , with parents more readily seeking additional support and more students being diagnosed with conditions, like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder.

In the wake of the pandemic, though, districts struggle to hire and—more importantly—keep their special education teachers, who are often beleaguered by stressful working conditions and a lack of resources.

Even as the field shifts to address workforce shortages, with some states considering extra pay for special education and others eyeing how artificial intelligence could lessen the burden of increased workloads, students with disabilities make up roughly 13 percent of the school population, said Natasha Strassfeld, an assistant professor in the department of special education at the University of Texas at Austin.

These are key terms educators should know.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act , or IDEA , is a federal law that establishes the rights of students with disabilities and their families.

First passed in 1975 and most recently reauthorized in 2004, the act provides grant funding to states that agree to the federal government’s vision for educating students with disabilities, said Strassfeld.

Students must be identified, evaluated, and deemed as IDEA eligible for the state to use federal money to educate that child. There are 13 categories under which a student could be eligible, including physical and intellectual disabilities.

There are about seven million students served under IDEA, said Strassfeld.

An Individualized Education Program , or IEP , is a legally binding contract between a school district and a family with a child with a disability. Under IDEA, students are afforded an IEP, said Dia Jackson, senior researcher for special education, equity, and tiered systems of support at the American Institutes of Research.

IEPs spell out what area a student has a disability in, how it impacts learning, and what the school will do to address those needs, such as providing speech or occupational therapy, more intensive instructional supports, and accommodations, including for standardized tests and other learning goals.

The number of IEPs is increasing in schools as conditions, like autism spectrum disorder, or ADHD, are being diagnosed more readily.

All students with disabilities are protected under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which requires schools to make “reasonable accommodation” for students with disabilities.

Educators don’t have to make specially designed instruction plans under a 504, but students can get certain accommodations, like elevator passes if a student is in a wheelchair, Jackson said.

“It’s a slightly different focus, but both play out in schools,” Jackson said.

Individualized family services plans , or IFSPs, are developed for children up to age 3 who need help with communication, social-emotional skills, and physical needs, Strassfeld said.

Like an IEP, the plan is made in collaboration with a parent or guardian, along with professionals such as a child care provider, religious leaders, or doctors. The document outlines a plan for families to help seek services—such as speech and language therapy, occupational therapy, medical services, and more—but is focused more on the family’s goals rather than strictly educational goals, Strassfeld said.

“While they’re focusing on pre-education goals, primarily at that age, we’re thinking about that child as being a part of a component of a family,” she said.

The right to a Free Appropriate Public Education , or FAPE , means that for every IDEA-eligible student, services must be provided at no cost to the student or their family, must be appropriate for the needs of the child, and have to be education oriented, Strassfeld said.

With FAPE, there is also the concept of least restrictive environment, or LRE, Jackson said. Students should be included to the fullest extent possible in mainstream classrooms and be challenged but appropriately supported, alongside their general education peers.

That’s not without its challenges, however, Strassfeld said.

“IDEA essentially is premised on the philosophical notion that it is that easy. It’s a real challenge for school districts,” she said, adding that as parents and advocates examine special education through disability justice and disability studies lenses, there are more critiques of the model.

Jackson said that she’s heard criticism along these lines: When students with disabilities aren’t prepared for a general education environment, or when general education teachers don’t have training on special education.

Response to intervention , or RTI , came as an amendment to IDEA in 2004 to help earlier identify students who are struggling before they begin failing, Jackson said, and begin giving them additional support through a tiered process. Generally, all students receive “tier I” instruction on grade-level standards. Then, students who need additional help get more intensive supports. That could look like a teacher working one-on-one, or in small groups, helping target specific areas to improve learning.

Intervention is an evidence-based program meant to address a specific learning or social-emotional need. It can be done in a general education classroom, and looks like regular teaching, Jackson said, but it uses particular materials and involves collecting data on progress.

The term RTI has evolved into multitiered system of supports , or MTSS , which is also a preventative framework, but goes beyond academics to consider the infrastructure districts need to implement MTSS, Jackson said.

“The shift to MTSS is meant to be more inclusive of the infrastructure as well as inclusive of social-emotional learning as well as academics,” she said.

A functional behavior assessment , or FBA , is a way for educators to collect data on student behavior, and what is triggering certain unwanted behavior, Jackson said.

For instance, she said, if a teacher has a student who has autism and, when they get upset, they throw a chair, an FBA could be conducted.

Once that analysis is collected, a behavior intervention plan , or BIP , is developed, describing what the behavior is, how often it happens, and what will be done to address it.

FBAs and BIPs are not without concerns, however, as students with disabilities—especially students of color—are more likely to face exclusionary discipline, such as suspension and expulsion.

“A lot of times, it is a subjective judgment call if a student is exhibiting ‘appropriate behavior’ or not,” Jackson said. “There’s a lot of potential bias that goes into discipline of students and behavior management.”

It’s one example of disproportionality , where an ethnic or racial group is over- or under-represented in certain areas. For instance, Jackson said, students of color with disabilities are over-represented in discipline, on being identified as having a disability, and being placed in more restrictive environments.

Restraint and seclusion are practices used in public schools as a response to student behavior that limits their movement and aims to deescalate them, by either physically limiting their movement (restraint) or isolating them from others (seclusion), according to previous EdWeek reporting .

The practice of physically restraining students with disabilities or placing them in isolation has been heavily scrutinized, but is still used in some states.

It should only be used in extreme cases when a student is at risk to harm themselves or others, Jackson said, but never as a behavior management technique, or as punishment. Students have been harmed, or even killed, as a result of restraints , Jackson said. Students of color are over-represented in the population who are restrained and isolated, Jackson added.

Even still, there are educators who don’t want to see the practices completely banned, Jackson said.

“Teachers have been hurt by students or they’ve been hurt in the midst of a restraint so they still want to have the option available,” she said. “It’s an issue of not having training in another alternative, so they feel like: ‘This is the only way I can handle this particular student, or type of student, because I don’t know anything else.’”

Strassfeld said that there’s been more focus on the practice alongside excessive force in law enforcement.

“There’s been discussion that disability advocates have had about criminalization of behaviors that a person has no control over, and this type of force seems to deny the humanity of people who perhaps are exhibiting behaviors they are not able to control,” she said.

Education Issues, Explained

Vanessa Solis, Associate Design Director contributed to this article.

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The Practical Value of Studying Philosophy

Posted in: Why Study Philosophy?

Transferable Skills

By studying philosophy, students develop cognitive transferable skills that pay off in a variety of professions—transferable skills such as Logical Reasoning • Analysis • Abstract Conceptualization • Problem-Solving • Creative Thinking • Clear and Persuasive Writing • Mental Dexterity • An Ability to Assess Different Perspectives and Frameworks • Information Management.

Earning Potential

The national median salary of Philosophy graduates is higher than nearly every other major in the social sciences, humanities, and higher than many other majors—higher than Psychology, Criminology, Communication, Special Education, Early Childhood Education, Business Management, Political Science, History, English, and so on (data source:  payscale.com ).

Which professions do philosophy graduates pursue? • Technology • Business • Law • Publishing • Government • Advertising • Journalism • Teaching • Sales • Human Resources • Public Relations • Activism • Public Policy, and so on.

Read about the practical value of studying philosophy

• Forbes  (2017) – “ A Case For Majoring In Philosophy ”

“Every year, college students choose their majors with an eye toward the return on investment. Among the usual lucrative suspects like finance and engineering, one liberal arts field stands out: philosophy. It turns out that philosophy majors earn significantly more than most majors, especially over the long term.”

“The surprisingly robust ROI [return on investment] for philosophy majors can be traced to its intellectual rigor. Philosophers are taught to seek out the pressure points in arguments and to reason for themselves. They dive into highly technical conversations, construct their own positions and arguments, and analyze relevant problems from multiple perspectives.”

“Beyond finances, the study of philosophy can also help students learn for themselves how they define the good life and how to go about living it.”

• U.S. News & World Report  (2020) – “ What You Can Do With a Philosophy Degree ”

“Philosophy students learn how to question conventional thinking, which is a marketable skill.”

“A Wall Street Journal analysis of the long-term earning potential of people with various college majors revealed that philosophy majors tend to get raises and promotions more quickly than individuals with other majors, and a result of this rapid career progression is that philosophy majors’ mid-career earnings are usually double the size of their starting salaries.”

• CNBC  (2018) – “ Mark Cuban says studying philosophy may soon be worth more than computer science—here’s why ”

“’I’m going to make a prediction’, Cuban told AOL in 2017. ‘In 10 years, a liberal arts degree in philosophy will be worth more than a traditional programming degree’…He views previously lucrative jobs in industries like accounting and computer programming as subject to the powers of automation. To remain competitive, Cuban advises ditching degrees that teach specific skills or professions and opting for degrees that teach you to think in a big picture way, like philosophy.”

• Times Higher Education  (2019) – “ What Can You Do with a Philosophy Degree? ”

“Philosophy graduates have highly transferable skills that are valuable to employers.”

“Graduates secure work in a variety of disciplines after their degree, such as teaching, PR or politics. Communications, publishing, HR and advertising can be attractive options for philosophy graduates, as well as law, banking, the civil service, business and science. Others go on to further study, research, academia and/or lecturing in philosophy or a related field.”

• Entrepreneur Magazine  (2017) – “ 5 Reasons Why Philosophy Majors Make Great Entrepreneurs ”

“When accomplished entrepreneurs like Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel and Carly Fiorina credit their philosophy backgrounds for their success, you have to wonder if they’re on to something.”

• New York Times  (2018) – “ A Wall Street Giant Makes a $75 Million Bet on Academic Philosophy ”

“Philosophy, he [Bill Miller] added, ‘has made a huge difference both to my life outside business, in terms of adding a great degree of richness and knowledge, and to the actual decisions I’ve made in investing’.”

“Mr. Miller, 67, is not the only old-guard Wall Street figure with a background in philosophy. George Soros was heavily influenced by the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper. Carl Icahn was a philosophy major at Princeton . . . (On the watchdog side of the street, Sheila Bair, the former chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, was also a philosophy major.)”

• Harvard Business Review  (2014) – “ How Philosophy Makes You a Better Leader ”

“A CEO client . . . found that contemplating the teachings of an ancient philosopher (Socrates) and a 20th century philosopher (Habermas) empowered him to implement an enhanced process of dialogue, consensus building, and ‘communicative rationality’ with his leadership team.”

• National Bureau Of Economic Research  (2017) – “ The Costs Of And Net Returns To College Major ”

“Health and Engineering majors, where earnings returns are large on a per graduate basis, have per-dollar returns similar to those observed in education, math, philosophy , and language degrees. .  .”

Graduate Study

Some philosophy majors go on to graduate studies in philosophy in order to pursue an academic career. The philosophy major is also exceptional training for many other post-graduate paths, such as law school. In fact, statistics indicate that philosophy majors perform very well on standardized tests for post-graduate and professional study.

• The GRE (“the SAT for graduate school”) – Philosophy majors come out on top.

“When students are compared by major on how far above average they do on the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE), a standardized test used in many disciplines to assess applicants to graduate programs, philosophy majors come out on top , according to a new look at test score data over the past few years.” (Daily Nous)

• Our philosophy department and Montclair State’s Feliciano School of Business have partnered for a “4 + 1” Philosophy BA/MBA program .
• The LSAT (the entrance exam for law school admissions) – Philosophy majors tie for first place with Economics majors.
• Medical School – The Philosophy major is a solid path to medical school. Consider the data and facts as explained by Paul Jung, M.D: “ If you think biochemistry is your ticket into medical school, think again. “