Teaching Philosophy

I believe in teaching my students to be good leaders who can be a positive force in their community and advocate for both local and global responsibility. 

I believe that students should be treated as continuous learners: that life is a work-in-progress and mastery should not be expected on the first try. I believe my students should be taught to seek continuous improvement, be eager for feedback and to develop good habits for life-long learning.

I believe that High School courses are best when they are designed to infuse multi-disciplinary categories of core standards. A multi-disciplinary approach encourages students to grow their skills and knowledge in unexpected ways. I believe that in High School, a multi-disciplinary learning style enables my students to be better able to adapt throughout their career and have better skills for pursuing their best life in service to others, in service to God and in service to our shared world. 

I believe that when my students are learning to make decisions about creating a technology, software, policy, product, service or experience I need to ask them to consider all things that are impacted: environmental sustainability, accessibility, privacy, human-centered and user-centered concerns, geopolitics, and the direct and indirect repercussions from their decisions. 

I believe that students should be taught to work in diverse teams and be part of a community; that every person brings their own skills, knowledge, innate talents and personality which shapes good teams. I believe that all people have something to contribute, and that this diversity makes teams and communities stronger 

I believe that students learn best when they pursue a learning path of their choosing, which combines their innate talents, interests and life-style preferences; those students are best served if they understand how their skillset is adaptable, and understand that they are more capable of developing new talents than they may realize.

I believe that when I teach my students to be future designers, developers, engineers, managers and communicators, I have a responsibility to educate them about the scaling of decisions: individual, small group, neighborhood, community, regional, national and global. That the decision for a small group may have unintended effects when scaled to a regional, national or global implementation. I will remind them that the people and things affected the most may not be the customer or the user: they still matter.

I believe that it is important that I teach my students to have strong ethics for Business and Product Development, Data Science, Engineering, Marketing, and Information & Communication Technology. These ethics should be based on Christian values including: love of God, love for one another, love for this world which was made for us by God and for forgiveness.