My philosophy of teaching is to create an environment that allows for supervised exploration. I believe that the most significant learning occurs in situations that are both meaningful and realistic. The overriding goal of my teaching has been to place learners in these types of situations. For situated learning to occur, the learner must be given access to the environment where the skills and knowledge will eventually be used. I believe that learner-oriented teaching promotes learning that is both purposeful and enduring. As a teacher, it is my responsibility to know who my learners are, what kinds of knowledge and experience they bring to the group, and what they want to achieve so that I can tailor a curriculum that fits their needs and yet leaves enough room to accommodate topics that emerge from group discovery. By assessing where my learners are with respect to our mutual learning goals, I can provide the scaffolding they need to build connections between what they already know and the new understandings they seek to create. I embrace case based teaching and other active learning activities because they stimulate intellectual camaraderie, argumentation, and cooperative problem solving and lay the groundwork for life-long collaborative practice.