My teaching is centered thus far around the belief that empathy and care-centered teaching is the most effective way to teach because the students have a baseline level of trust and security built with the teacher in this style of teaching. I think of this idea of care-centered teaching as parallel to the concept of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow concludes that a human's foundational needs of physiological care and then emotional needs of safety and security must be met before the next level of need can be addressed and built upon (Maslow 120). For example, considering teaching, students will be unable to learn from a teacher, no matter the resources or teaching style used, if they are hungry, tired, or feel physically ill or unsafe. This humanist view of thinking centers around the idea of higher learning and that this cannot be achieved until basic, foundational needs are met first. In my experience, I have seen this firsthand through my students who are not able to focus on learning academically because they are struggling to stay awake or to figure out where their next meal will come from. 

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Similarly, I think this philosophy could also be compared to that of the curriculum and education theorist, Nel Noddings, who focused her teaching philosophy around the “ethics of care” and taught the idea that “care is basic in human life….and all people want to be cared for” (Noddings 2002:11). By intentionally focussing on the student’s emotional needs and ensuring that each student feels important enough to be cared for as an individual, Nodding’s philosophy encouraged the same idea as Maslow in that the student’s psychological, mental, and emotional needs must be met before effective teaching can take place. The theory of humanism focuses on the individual as a whole so these psychological, mental, and emotional needs all need to be addressed in equal measure and thus academic intelligence can’t be the only focus of a student. 

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In my teaching experience, I’ve seen this principle play out firsthand constantly. I have encountered many students who had the academic ability to succeed but were unable to because of some other, more basic need not being met first. In past years, I had a student with a severe autoimmune disorder that caused her to be in and out of the hospital consistently and took a serious toll on her body physically and mentally. Because so much of her energy was being directed towards fighting for her life and was being used to meet her physical needs, she often did not have the energy to come to school at all or would fall asleep in class when she was in school. On many occasions, she expressed to me that she had serious “brain fog” and was struggling to focus, compute, and absorb information that she felt like she once would have been able to understand with no difficulty. On her good days, she was able to reflect on the content and assess her situation clearly, but because her baseline needs of physiological care were not always able to be met, she struggled to succeed and was not able to academically perform at the level that she wanted to and knew she previously could have.