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Our Educational Philosophy:Three Kinds of Educational Positions:In our work, we generally see the interplay of any three attitudes toward academics: doing school work, talking about school work, or taking a break from/avoiding school work all together--the pedagogical, reflective, and metaphorical/playful positions, respectively. In this respect, a "lesson" can range from an examination of the derivation of the Pythagorean theorem to how to negotiate unorthodox learning styles with a teacher to finding creative ways to compromise with a kid sister.Pedagogical Position:Our approach is to foster the pedagogical stance by providing encouraging support of the student's abilities and potentials. Within a student's pedagogical position, we can use a mix of guided practice, scaffolding, Socratic method, comparative analysis, explicit instruction, and co-constructive dialogue. In the pedagogical position we can also address executive functioning issues such as time management, organizational skills, study skills, self-monitoring, and so on. Additionally, we may attend to numerous cognitive developmental windows which emerge in our work together, such as moving from concrete to more abstract reasoning and eventually meta-cognitive thinking (which is comprised of reflective capacities including awareness of one's own thought processes). As mentors, our pedagogical role also has broader implications for human development. Thus, our long term goals for students include helping them learn to reflect on their relationship with educators as well as their educational system, develop as citizens of a democracy, and find the passions that can lead to a career and a calling.Reflective Position:Much of our work focuses on resistances to learning. Maybe a student doesn't like learning from certain teachers, or maybe she doesn't like certain subject matters, and as a result her performance is suffering. A student might resist the educational process as a whole, or think school is boring. Often resistance stems from a lack of motivation. Our goal is to help students come to understand their resistances or learning disorders (which constitute a kind of resistance in their own right) and work through them in the service of generating motivation. Often, this motivation is a product of the relationships we form with students, in which case our long term goal is to help students internalize what our relationship affords them so that they can ultimately graduate from the the mentoring process. Developmental psychology helps us to understand what normal development ought to look like. When a student's development veers from the normal path, cultural theories on development help us consider alternative paths and psychodynamic theories provide insights into where development may have been arrested. Additionally, emotion theories provide methods for helping students to develop awareness of and work through their resistances.Metaphorical or Play Position:At times, students are utterly resistant to formally doing or talking about school work with us. For us, this does not mean opportunities to help students are shut down. Research indicates that when students talk freely, or playfully, they integrate many of the teachings of formal learning, and we consider play or free dialogue to be one of the chief means by which we can learn about a student's natural learning abilities as well as motivations. The more freely students minds are able to roam when working with usÑwithin agreed upon boundariesÑthe more meaningful their experience with us, and the more trust they develop with us, allowing us to move into reflective and pedagogical positions. Furthermore, students often unconsciously use metaphor to describe the struggles they are having academically, cognitively, emotionally or reflectively. By observing how they solve problems in other contexts, we can help them adapt similar problem solving approaches to problems of the pedagogical or reflective positions. |