Statement of Teaching Philosophy
The US labor statistics show that health care is one of the most rapidly developing fields that accounts for the fact that it provides a huge variety of opportunities and options to build a career. The ones that I consider preferable for myself are a health administration instructor and an instructor of applied ethics.
The ultimate task of a health administration instructor is to promote the culture of life-long personal and professional development while supporting all facets of the learning environment. If I manage to occupy this position, I will facilitate the meaningful acquisition of knowledge and skills providing education through student-oriented instruction. My major goal will be to enable graduate students to comply with the requirements of the industry while preserving high-quality standards that rely on professional ethics as well as mutual respect and cooperation with colleagues. The key values that I will communicate to my students will include:
- providing high-quality service;
- promoting innovation;
- adhering to life-long learning;
- developing collaboration through teamwork;
- sticking to sound ethical principles;
- never stepping away from positive thinking.
My second option is to become an instructor of applied ethics – the profession that I consider fundamental to many spheres including health care. Ethical leadership in this field will help me guide future professionals through various dilemmas that demand difficult choices and quick and effective decisions. Moreover, I believe that the pivotal idea of my teaching philosophy will be a combination of the policy of the institution with care for patients as the ultimate goal of any health care professional.
I am convinced that no matter which of the two options I choose, my success will have three basic constituents: knowledge (that will give me understanding about the profession and its peculiarities), critical evaluation (that allows realizing one’s potential and identify directions for improvement), and scientific curiosity (helping overcome limitations of the existing knowledge through life-long development).
That is why I believe that my mission as an educator consists in both communicating fundamental theoretical knowledge prescribed by the curriculum and encouraging critical assessment that would assist students in the application of theory to real-life practice. The ability to find the practical implementation of any information will help my students when they discover professional areas that are currently void of scientific knowledge and theoretical generalizations. They will be able to hypothesize and deduce consistent patterns through empirical experimentation thereby filling this void. I will do my best to serve as a role model as I am sure that demonstrating your professional excellence is an issue of paramount importance in education.
I am also going to make a special emphasis on the individual approach to each student taking into consideration that they all belong to different backgrounds, have different levels of preparation, and desire for learning. I will try to help them find areas that seem exciting to them as this is the primary condition of meaningful learning.
As far as instructional modalities are concerned, I suppose that I will have to deal with both face-to-face and online education. However, I firmly believe that hybrid learning is the most advantageous combination. If it is carefully developed, it can unite the best features of traditional and Internet-based education: hybrid education increases class availability and at the same time speeds up students on their way to graduation.
Moreover, it will open new opportunities for those who cannot attend classes due to various health challenges. They will still have access to education based on traditional instruction while being able to establish a closer contact with an educator than online learning allows.