Elissa Jones
Seminar and Practicum Supervisor
4th Semester Elementary Education 

Click on any item with an apple
to learn how that component figured into our work.

The individual pages are connected with links: you can return here to navigate or jump directly from page to page. The teaching philosophy page is a good place to start.

Concept Map Overview:

The philosophy is a nice place to start, because that's where we started thinking and talking together as a seminar group. The focus/goals become the directed link between philosophy and practice. Practice is also affected in the long term by the larger community of educators (as well as the institution of schools), and in the short term by the standards as teachers analyze their practice. The standards are created over time by the professional community that the candidate is joining, and both the standards and that professional community help shape the candidate's teaching philosophy. Professional growth is the dynamic center of the whole concept, and all the movement and links among components operate to that end, at the level of the individual and the profession.

Some of the links are direct: teaching philosophy --> focus/goals --> teaching practice. Others are more roundabout: a candidate's goals affect her practice, which becomes part of the professional community, which eventually creates standards for the profession.