My Teaching Philosophy

Juiching Wang

            “Teaching is learning” exemplifies my teaching philosophy. My primary goal in teaching is to impart the knowledge I possess and habituate my students as much to an attitude of embracing all sorts of knowledge. In the act of instruction, however, I also learn—learn exclusively from the interaction both intellectually and emotionally I have with my students whom I see as potential professionals in my field, music and music education.

            Encouraging students to work together to learn more of musical cultures other than the western classical music, for me, is a key to open my students’ minds for a variety of knowledge. I learn how diverse my students could be through observing their teamwork; I learn how differently my students would react to various world music cultures from reading their comments; I also learn how appreciative my students become as the course go on.       

            My teaching philosophy for music majors, specifically in music education, remains the same in substance. Moreover, I require additional critical thinking skill from my students so that they can tell the quality of music as well as their instructional strategy. Effective classroom management is yet another requirement I insist my students to hold on hoping individual child will benefit from learning music to the greatest extent from their effective teaching style.

            To be a role model of the pre-service music educators, I demonstrate the characteristics of professional, caring, and passionate for everything related to my teaching. I am professional, for I always well-equip myself with knowledge of music and music education and update it as frequently as possible. I am caring, for I am aware of the individual learning styles of my students and striving to be flexible in adjusting the curriculum. I am passionate, for I know the more I teach the more I learn.  

            “Music is for everyone” is the fundamental of my philosophy in all. Thus, I also see myself as music educator for the general public. For the nonmusic major students, for example, my aim is to provide them with opportunities to develop awareness and understanding of music as an integral part of the human experience and wish them to listen perceptively to music even after the course. Instead of traditional lecture-oriented method, I use an approach that emphasizes students’ cooperative learning capability in which they need to work as small teams to construct musical knowledge through discovery learning, problem solving, and decision-making. Materials covered in the course, also differentiates from the conventional content occupied mainly by the western classical music, include various music cultures of other world origins. 

          I love music; I learn music; and therefore I dedicate my career to teaching music. I intend to enjoy teaching as much as I enjoy learning music. In my teaching career, fortunately, I have been highly rewarded by the outstanding performances of my students and the life-long relationships they have maintained with the knowledge they have learnt in and out of my class. I know for sure that with the coming of each new course I am assigned or challenge brought by my students, I have to strive for more effective and up-to-dates pedagogies and materials not only to better my teaching, but also to enrich my philosophical belief to a more comprehensive level.

I have learnt more than I expected in many aspects since I started to teach. Initiating  from these wonderful experiences, I look forward to seeing myself not only being a competent teacher, but also an effective learner who appreciates learning from working with students time after time in my teaching career.