The IB Learner Profile (5) – Principled

Principled.

I think this goes beyond teaching and starts reaching into how you act or behave for your students – what type of role model you are, if you like …. but I won’t go into this, I’ll save that for another day. I want to focus on being a principled Chemistry teacher.

As well as covering the curriculum, we need to demonstrate to our students that we mean what we say. It is no good teaching students about the importance of looking after the environment and the pouring some potassium dichromate down the sink. As best as we can we need to demonstrate good health and safety measures, not only for our own students but for others (ie, the environment as well) – to me, this is the essence of being ‘principled’ in Chemistry. Other parallels to principled can be drawn to other areas of teaching or other subjects but the ‘health and safetey’ element I believe, is (mostly) unique to Chemistry.