Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy is very simple. All children are educable ALL THE TIME. Every moment is a learning moment, and all kids are capable of them. I started by becoming my autistic daughters' first teacher because there was no one else  to do it as we were living in India at the time. I made it my goal that 80% of my 24 hours would be spent in teaching mode. With a child who has autism and virtually no language, time matters. If I wanted my daughter to have any kind of functional speech by her fourth birthday (a statistically significant developmental window) I had less than a year to teach her what she should have been learning in her first three, but didn't. I figured the only way to make up the time was to compress it so that all our interactions were linguistically meaningful. I use this exact same approach with my ESL kids who have years of language to learn in as short a time as possible.