1. Statement of Teaching Philosophy
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UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
Statement of Teaching Philosophy
EDCP 472
Business Practices in Education
Instructor: Dr. Vincent Chan
Wafaa Alshanqeti
July 13, 2015

2. Statement of Teaching Philosophy
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My belief is that education is about much more than simply filling minds with facts,
figures, and proven processes. It is about cultivating a way of thinking and feeling about a
subject, and creating a mindset that allows individuals to approach a challenge in a way best-
suited to produce an optimal outcome. In other words, while it is vitally-important that students
have a solid foundation of knowledge upon which to draw, this is merely the launching pad for
the process of recognizing, engaging with, and ultimately solving complex problems and
challenges. Education is about shaping people and ways of thinking as much as it is about
creating bodies of knowledge, and the very best approaches to education recognize this. Often,
for example, we are subjected to reports about the supposed superiority of educational systems in
Asia and other parts of the world, and yet, when it comes to innovation in IT, the sciences,
economics, and other areas, educational systems in Canada, the United States, and other parts of
the developed world manage to produce an incredible range of innovative people who are able to
take entire industries to the next level of change and development. There is obviously enormous
room for improvement in education, but our emphasis on maximizing the talents and capacities
of each and every student has been a great success and must continue.
It is my deepest wish to contribute to education a continuing belief in the power, creativity,
and uniqueness of the individual student. While I believe fully in ensuring that students have an
extremely deep and broad pool of knowledge at their disposal, and I recognize that good teaching
must embrace proven methods of transferring this knowledge to students, I have always been
principally interested in helping students make use of knowledge in the most effective and
exciting ways possible. To my mind, no two students are ever exactly alike, and no two students
should ever emerge from a system of education with exactly the same values, beliefs, goals, and
mental processes. Their unique qualities must emerge as a product of the educational process
even if the 'facts and figures' absorbed are essentially identical. My goal, ultimately, is to help
each and every student maximize his or her innate talents, as well as his or her unique ways of
seeing the world. This approach is guaranteed to produce conditions in which students can
contribute to society in meaningful ways and society, in trying to better itself, can draw upon a

3. Statement of Teaching Philosophy
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wide range of dynamic individuals. My goal, in short, is to make students the best people they
can possibly be. Presented with such an exciting range of talent, society as a whole cannot help
but benefit. Good teaching revolves around effective engagement, constructive feedback,
challenges to assumptions, and constant inquiry. The role of a teacher is never to simply recite
knowledge in the hope that it will be absorbed, retained, and used in an effective way. In the
spirit of the great teachers of the ancient world like Socrates (who knew that education has much
more to do with how you think than the facts you have at hand), I suggest that education is
mainly about helping students master individualized processes of identifying what is true, valid,
and sustainable. As a result, I favour teaching methods that rely on small groups of students
sharing, testing, and challenging assumed knowledge amongst themselves; I gravitate to methods
that place the teacher in the position of a co-ordinator or facilitator of exploration, i.e. not a
vessel of absolute truth, but a guide that students can look to as they attempt to master
knowledge. Once again, testing of basic knowledge--some of which must be learned by rote is
unavoidable and cannot be dispensed with, because free-flowing inquiry depends on common
mastery of certain shared facts. But assessment depends as much on subjective judgement of
how students reach answers as it does on the answers themselves. Ultimately, the difference
between 'mastery of facts' and 'mastery of unique processes that lead to unprecedented
knowledge and understanding' is the difference between 'classroom smarts' and the ability to
innovate in a highly-competitive world where everyone (or at least most of one's competitors)
has a complete foundation of shared knowledge. Assessment, in short, involves much more than
simply marking answers 'right' or 'wrong.' My own field, Leadership and Administration in
Education, is one in which individual dynamism and creative thinking are indispensable; unique
conditions and challenges demand unique, comprehensive, and sustainable solutions, and no one
is going to succeed without effective (and sometimes necessarily radical) solutions to
unprecedented problems. Education in this area must stress creativity above all else.
Finally, as I have implied throughout this piece, the locus of so much creative energy in
modern society lies in the fusion of business and IT. This is where North American education,
with its emphasis on innovation, individualism, and resistance to the status quo has had such

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incredible and visible success. Asia may indeed be the 'workshop of the world,' but North
America remains the intellectual heart of a great deal of modern industry, including everything
from communications systems and aerospace to medicine and modern transport.
Entrepreneurship and IT are at the core of all modern development and are integral to prosperity
and rising living standards, both at home and abroad. Knowledge of the way business, computer
systems, and cyberspace interact is thus indispensable, and teaching in this area is vitally-
important to domestic and global development. Indeed, this area, perhaps more than any other,
demonstrates the way in which intellectual dynamism and iconoclasm, more than simple mastery
of what has come before, make all the difference to both individuals and society as a whole.
People who imagine the world in new ways are the key to future progress, and teaching must
reflect this in all its approaches and assumptions.