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     My main guiding principles as a teacher is establishing a classroom that is student centered. There are many layers to creating an environment that is truly grounded in the best interests of the students. First off, I aspire to teach in a way that accesses students' experiences and funds of knowledge. By introducing content with multiple points of entry, students are able to construct their own ideas about content through connections that they make to their own lived experience. This makes the material more engaging, relevant, and meaningful. 

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     Another way in which I will engage students in a meaningful way is through inquiry based learning. With this structure of instruction, students become active participants in their own learning and are pushed to think critically. I hope for students to develop a more personal relationship with the content as they learn to make observations, ask questions, and draw their own conclusions about material presented to them.​  Furthermore, these activities should be centered around scientific processes. Students should be doing assignments that actually give them a sense of how science is conducted in real life. This includes students generating hypotheses, designing experiments, collecting and interpreting data, and communicating their results to others. 

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     Lastly, I will work to create a classroom that is accommodating to a diverse group of learners. I will provide multiple modalities of instruction, as well as multiple forms of assessment in order to best support a diversity of students’ needs. I will work to achieve an equitable classroom by acknowledging unique identities of students, especially those that are far different from my own. I will work to uplift underrepresented groups by teaching non dominant narratives. Most importantly, I hope to empower students and provide them with agency in their own learning, so that they may be confident in their abilities to accomplish their goals.