Keep the main thing, the main thing. My energy should stay focused on creating a classroom where students know that they are in store for self discovery and growth that will help illuminate the path they’ll take and make it a little easier to follow. I hope to teach my students that they have potential to live the life they dream of, and I believe that teachers play a great role in making that happen. I believe that:
Meaningful learning must be authentic
Students take ownership in their learning when they are given choices. There are numerous ways to approach the solution to a problem. I hope to inspire students to make choices, evaluate and reflect on those choices, fail and attempt again, and grow through their own experiments.
Teachers can’t stop learning
Being committed to being a lifelong learner is as important as anything else in the school system. Yes, I firmly believe that a stagnant teacher creates a stagnant environment. Professional development, collaboration, membership in organizations, research, and pursuit of continued formal education are activities that directly impact the learning of students more than anything else a teacher can do. A teacher must read, study, collaborate, and learn new things all of the time. Just consider how much has changed in the last thirty years and imagine a teacher who never grew past the time they started.
People are social learners
Instruction and some assessment should be cooperative. There aren’t too many jobs where an employee will be required to live a solitary life and solve problems without any collaboration, yet, in the past, education forced a quiet work environment where students worked on problems alone at their desks. Of course there is a time when students need to be assessed individually to ensure that each student has picked up the basic knowledge, but cooperative learning environments with problem-based learning mimic a much more realistic real world experience. When students are given the opportunity to consult with each other, bounce ideas off of each other, take and provide critique to others, and communicate and make decisions as part of a team, deeper learning and longer retention are likely.
Relationships are key
As tired as the phrase becomes, all matters in life come down to relationships. If I want students to trust my guidance and ethos, I have to find a way to connect what I do to who they are. Through appropriate connections, I can help students to see the relevance of what they do.
A high quality education is the foundation of democracy
I am entrusted with helping students to learn to understand their world, free of my opinions and biases, but through the creation of lessons that empower students to be critical consumers of information. My job is to help them filter through the barrage of information to form their own questions. In our very heavily media infused world, students need to learn a process to apply to what they read and hear. This notion is important to all students regardless of their prior background, and I consider this practice to be important to the future of our nation.