Vincent McLeod IV outlines his classroom philosophy which focuses on 5 core principles: creating enlightened thinkers, championing students who lack support, maintaining a positive environment, ensuring student success, and preparing students for the future. He believes in setting high standards, adapting to student needs, and creating a team atmosphere where students support each other's learning. His goal is to guide students as an "enlightened thinker" through challenging lessons that promote inquiry and critical thinking over simple knowledge transmission. He acknowledges teaching requires hard work to understand each student but views it as an important way to continually progress society.

1. EDUC 509 Classroom Philosophy Vincent McLeod IV
Classroom Philosophy
It is tough for me to find my five core philosophies out of the ten I generated. I believe that all
ten service my philosophy of teaching to a high degree. However, the five philosophies that I
have chosen are as follows:
1. Create and Enlightened thinker; teach for enlightenment!
2. The “lost” need someone to fight for them and be their champion to help pull them
towards personal greatness.
3. Negativity is the absence of positivity; we always must be positive in what we do.
4. Create an environment for success always.
5. I am teaching future generations; therefore, I must live in the future with my goals.
I chose these particular philosophies because of their forward thinking mindset. Inquiry based
students are constantly challenging themselves to achieve higher degrees of learning. They are
never happy with a status quo answer or rationale. Always showing positivity in everything that
we do is vital to set up a proactive learning environment. When students are positive, their
output will reflect quality insight and understanding. Remembering that the students today are
the future leaders of tomorrow dictates how I need to incorporate thought into my lessons plans
continuously. The past is good to reference so we do not make the same mistake(s), or we do the
correct things again and again. With our content knowledge development, we must equip
students with the skills they will need to tackle the future. This ensures us teachers that we are
always changing and challenging out ways of thinking; never being stagnant in the profession.
My favorite is championing for those that never seem to have someone standing up for them.
No student should be left untouched in our efforts at school. There exist a lot of students that
feel that no one is there for their development. These “lost” students materialize into less than
those students who constantly are being praised and given the right opportunities to succeed.
Every student is there to be for us teachers to help and assist.
As a teacher, I will need to avoid showing friendly support (in the buddy way). Making students
feel that you are their buddy is something that must be avoided. However, I need to develop
trust with them so we can have an environment of respect flowing both ways. I need to be their
friend, but not their buddy. Although this looks similar, it is surely different. Friends care and
are willing to say or do anything, both positive and negative in resemblance, to get someone to
do achieve to something. Sometimes having to be “negative” in getting that person to start
dealing with reality is needed. Buddies coddle their friends and never say anything that their
friend would not want to hear, whereas a friend will be honest and up front if need be to truly
take care of their friend. Modeling my teaching in this way is critical for me to uphold my
teaching philosophies. I will honor integrity always with the job, for without that element, the
job is meaningless and we become mere babysitters of time. It is important for me to always be
challenging my students toward becoming enlightened thinkers. I never want to teach a student
just to acquire knowledge, for they can do that by going to a bookstore and reading on their own

2. EDUC 509 Classroom Philosophy Vincent McLeod IV
time. I want to give them the guidance they need to explore more in depth topics and create
thought provoking arguments that challenge opinions. Even if they are not challenging
opinions, they are at least supporting their developed arguments through evidentiary support.
This process makes them ready for the rigors of the real world, moving beyond just mastering
content knowledge on a formative assessment. It is furthermore important for my teaching
style to be adaptive, not static in my ways. Students offer different challenges constantly, so
having adaptive lesson plans to take in to account these needed accommodations is beyond vital
for my classroom’s overall success.
The vision I have for my role as a teacher is to be the “Captain” of the ship. The Captain guides
and keeps order, but outside of that, does little of the actual work needed in order to keep the
ship on course. The crew drives the ship and keeps it running on course. Poor skills as a
Captain can also ensure that the ship is driven off course, despite the best efforts of the crew. In
this manner, I need to steer my students on the path I want them to take as an enlightened
thinker. They must be prepared to do the work to get to the destination at the end of the course,
for I will not sail their ship for them. Through this analogy, I can create a team atmosphere
wherein all students in the class (team) want to participate for the greater collective good of the
team’s success. Students who feel they are a part of a bigger entity will not give up when the
going gets tough, for they are not only affecting their performance, but the performance of
others that they have built social relationships with. This team atmosphere vision helps drive
the processes and activities that I incorporate in teaching.
At the end of the day, this job is going to entail a lot of work on my end no doubt. Creating
enlightened thinkers does not come just by standing at the front and giving students tasks to
complete. I have to know a lot of attributes about my students in order to see what their
strengths and weaknesses are in comparison to each other. How do I ensure that students
individually succeed while preserving a team atmosphere of success? Teaching to student’s
interest and likes is also imperative moving forward, for I can effectively ensure a higher degree
of understanding when the students correlate what they like with what they are aiming to study.
Moving beyond teaching for transmission and into a curriculum practice of teaching for
transaction/inquiry is my goal that is going to require me to always be focusing on the objectives
I lay out. Perhaps this is highly normative in thought and far less empirical in how I will really
teach, but it shouldn’t be! By setting my goals and objectives to a higher level, I am ensuring
that even on my less stellar days, I am still above average in output for my students and what
they are achieving. Being tired is something I probably will have to get used to with this
rationale. Luckily I know through real world work experience that if you are going to succeed at
anything, be prepared to work your tail off. Nothing comes easy in life, so why should teaching
be any different? Teaching is more than a profession, it is an attribute of life that only select few
can master. It is funny that Plato, when he was discussing the important figures in life in terms
of their status, listed teachers/philosophers at the very top of society; seems ironic with the
current flak that teachers often receive in society. Business folk and soldiers all fell down the
list. For if we cannot teach, we cannot learn. If we cannot learn then we never are making the

3. EDUC 509 Classroom Philosophy Vincent McLeod IV
world a better place. We need to live in a society that is always developing forward in many
different capacities. The profession of teaching is the real way in which we can ensure that we
always move forward. For this notion, I am being elated and privileged to able to head down
this path. My only regret is that I didn’t recognize my feelings earlier in life for the affinity of I
have towards teaching.