My Philosophy of Education Essay -- Educational Philosophy

As an educator we all struggle with philosophy and where to go from there once we decide what our set of beliefs are. Once we put our philosophy in place, we then struggle with changing our philosophy. I believe that philosophies can be always changing any given situation and in order for growth as an educator we have to be aware of the situations that can change our philosophy, as well as being true to our core beliefs. However, in order for this to happen we must understand what philosophy is, and what it is not and how it fall in line with ideology and theories. For this assignment, I will compare and contrast philosophy, ideology, and theory. Philosophy is the most beliefs about what is true or real according to individual values (Gutek, 2009). Philosophy is our beliefs that will determine what we do professionally and personally. Not having a philosophy set in place, it will be difficult to make decisions within the classroom, creating curriculums and evaluate progress. Although a person can set goals without having a philosophy implemented, not having the foundation of a set philosophy (core set of beliefs) achieving the goals can be a very difficult challenge. Educators need a starting point to understand why we think and act the way we do in our classrooms. Having a philosophy allows an educator to reflect on how to make classroom actions consistent with our beliefs related to learning. However, before we list our â€Å"beliefs† we need to delve deeper into what makes up our philosophy. There are four major components to philosophy – Metaphysics, Epistemology, Axiology, and Logic (Gutek, 2009). In order to be able to understand philosophy we need to be able to understand its components. Metaphysics is the branch of philosop... ...ke in formulating a philosophy is self-reflective and formative. As educators generate ideas about what their teaching philosophy may be, all of the above are taken into consideration in determining attitudes, values, and beliefs about learning and teaching. A set of guidelines need to be implemented, and these guidelines will be worked and reworked as time and experiences happen. Educational philosophies are foundations of everything that we do as teachers. They are based upon our assumptions, definitions of learning, purpose of education and the nature of instructional process. It is an ever-changing process throughout our teaching career. What may be our philosophy today may not be our philosophy tomorrow. Works Cited Gutek, Gerald Lee. (2009). New perspectives on philosophy and education. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education Inc.