Abby's Teaching Philsophy

1. I believe in creating an inclusive and interactive environment to foster cultural awareness and sensitivity to our differences.

1.1. "People's behaviors are largely the result of their experiences with stimuli in their immediate environments (Ormrod, 2014, p. 265)." One of the ideas of behaviorism is students can become whomever they are molded to be. The more positive influences they are around, the more positive traits they will adopt.

2. I believe in encouraging reading outside class because reading can provide students with an understanding of the world around them second only to experiencing the world themselves.

2.1. Instrumental conditioning uses "reinforcers and punishments" as "environmental stimuli that influence behavior (Ormrod, 2014, p. 270)." By providing reinforcements for outside reading, students can learn not only from the books they choose to enjoy outside class-required books, but also they learn that reading can be fun and enjoyable in their pursuit of being life-long learners.

3. I believe modeling honesty and caring behavior provides the building blocks for a civil society.

3.1. Both the Children see. Children do and the Bandura’s Bobo Doll Experiment clips show that children model the behavior of the authority in their life, both positive (helping someone pick up groceries from a broken grocery bag [jab514, 2006]) and negative (playing violently with the Bobo doll [Everywhere Psychology, 2012]). These videos support the social cognative theory (Ormrod, 2014, p. 299). The more positive an environment I can provide and model for students, the more likely they are to follow the example. Even adults decide how seriously to approach a class by how seriously the instructor takes it. If an instructor is constantly late, the students will have no problem being late.