Transform Your Teaching: The Philosophy of Servant Teaching

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In this week’s episode of “Transform Your Teaching,” Rob and Jared introduce a series on servant teaching with a discussion on the philosophy behind it as well as the biblical basis for being a servant teacher. Check out the episode to hear their conversation, including three practical ways to start with servant teaching.

Podcast links

Show Notes

We define servant teaching as “empowering learners by removing barriers, building on their unique strengths, and providing opportunities to succeed.”

Everyone has a philosophy of education that is born from their personal philosophy. Consider questions like: What’s real? What’s right, and how do we know it’s right? What do we do with it?

You have a philosophy of education, and whether you have thought about it extensively or not at all, we are here to help you!

Ultimately, our goal is to make the implicit, explicit. We define implicit as “what we do because it’s the way we’ve always done it or seen it done.” Explicit: those things we do because we’ve thought about why we’re doing it.

Practically speaking, we need to begin with three things:

We need to seek wisdom (James 1; Proverbs 4:7)
We need to ask ourselves, “why do I do what I do?” (The 5 Whys)
We need to ask others

This concept of “Servant Teaching” is really the underpinning of what we do at the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University. It is our “lens” by which we see things, especially our philosophy of education.