Katey Wisniewski

Background

About Katey Wisniewski

It is often said that education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire. I believe that the purpose of education is not to fill students’ minds with facts and knowledge, but to teach them how to ask questions and explore the world to discover the answers, a process that will serve them throughout their lives. I believe that learning should be based on inquiry, whether students or teachers are asking the questions, and that the learning comes through figuring out how to answer them. Learning should be experiential and authentic as often as possible. In the book Experience and Education, John Dewey talks about the absurdity of teaching students to swim in the classroom on dry land versus teaching them in the water. We learn better through experience, and although we may need to provide those experiences in a classroom due to logistics, I believe it is best to make them as hands-on and authentic as possible. By making a classroom into a place of inquiry where learning is created, students are engaged and excited about learning and are developing the skills they need to learn for a lifetime. James Comer stated, “No significant learning occurs without a significant relationship.” Others have often said that students will not care how much you know until they know how much you care. My teaching style is founded on building positive relationships with my students. In doing so, they are comfortable with each other and in my classroom: we truly become a community. In this community, it is okay to make mistakes because our mistakes are great opportunities for learning. Through relationship building, I am able to discover my students’ backgrounds and interests and help them make real-world connections to our curriculum, which makes everything that we learn more authentic.