The Inadequacies of Assigning “My Philosophy of Education” Statements in Teacher Education Courses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In teacher education programs, there is a prevalent belief that having teacher candidates compose personalized ‘my philosophy of education’ (MPE) statements is a valuable exercise that prepares them for the teaching profession. This paper argues that the prevailing intentions for, and common practice of, assigning these MPE statements to teacher candidates are problematic because they distort both the discipline of philosophy and the purpose of philosophy of education courses. The argument’s first section situates the practice of assigning MPE statements within the context of teacher education programs’ strong commitments to social constructivism and the reflective practitioner, and relates the problems associated with those commitments. It then reviews literature that describes the common properties and practices of assigning MPE statements. The second and third sections then develop the arguments that MPEs rely on and reinforce distortions of philosophy as a discipline and misconceptions about the purposes of philosophy of education courses in teacher education programs. Those two arguments share a theme that MPE statements reduce philosophy and philosophizing about education to declaring and clarifying an unexamined personal commitment, and hence drift toward enabling relativism. Finally, the conclusion relates how, in conjunction with those distortions, the use of MPE statements has acquired the function of certifying a teacher’s suitability to fit within the status quo. This situation, it claims, unfortunately distracts candidates and others in the teaching profession from developing their critical philosophical skills in responding to the epistemic, moral, and political realities of education and schooling.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.088 | 0.204 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".