As a future teacher, I have individual beliefs and values about teaching and learning and how I will implement these into my teaching in the next few years. When asked why I want to be a teacher, I always respond with something along the lines of “making sure students have the same schooling experience I did” and “I love working with kids and seeing them succeed and teaching aligns perfectly with that.” Along with these reasons, there are plenty more that I have that I hope to implement when I become a certified teacher:
When I’m struggling with classes related to my education major, I often think about the future and what I am working towards. I think about all of the future students that I will have sitting in small desks with long name tags and tennis balls on the bottom of the chairs. I think about how all of those students will have a teacher that they can trust and have respect for, without being too formal. I feel this is so important to a student’s success. While being an ELA tutor for a second grader, I learned early on that having trust with the one that is teaching you is crucial to this successful learning experience. The students feel more comfortable and confident when with you, they feel comfortable making mistakes and learning from them, and they feel more confident in themselves as a student and know their strong suits.
Hand-in-hand with trust includes creating an environment where students can make mistakes and not feel like they will be burdened for doing so. There have been too many times where I have seen students in the classrooms that I have worked in become distressed over the fact that they made a mistake. This is not an environment that I want to create. While understanding that mistakes happen, as a future teacher, I will teach my students to recognize mistakes and look at them as a way to learn and grow. Whether it be a mistake on an assignment or on the playground, we can all grow when there are mistakes made. This idea of creating an accepting environment for mistakes allows students the opportunity to grow, and will later have a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset.
There have been times where I’ve been worried about not being able to teach students, I look back to my experiences in my education class as well as my math class. You have to understand where your students are at. We talk about knowing where your students are at all the time in EDUC 101 and 102. Every student learns at a different pace. We cannot, as educators, assume that all students are at the same learning pace. You have to be able to develop methods to teach your students who might be at different understanding levels. In my math class, we’ve learned different ways of teaching different areas of math so that we are able to better suit our students if needed. Whether this is working with children one-on-one to help them better understand, or showing different ways to teach something to students to help them understand, meeting your students where they are at is so important to the growth and development of students and a belief that I hold high in my philosophy.
Going hand in hand with meeting students where they are at, if you, as a teacher, notice that your students aren’t understanding what you are teaching them, adjust what you are doing to help them better understand. In middle school, I remember sitting in my science class learning about the different layers of the earth and what they are all composed of. By the time it was time to take the test, most students didn’t understand what we had learned, and didn’t do well on the test. Instead of assuming that we didn’t study or just flew through the test, my teacher decided to reteach the lesson and retest us again. We did significantly better when she retested us than before all because she took it upon herself to adjust her teaching and lesson so that we understood. Even if it meant falling a little behind, she cared more about our understanding than following the curriculum, which I think is so important to being an educator. Being a reflective practitioner instead of a strict “by the book” practitioner is so much more valuable.
Adjusting your lessons is important because not all students learn the same way. Some students might be visual learners, others might be kinesthetic, while others might be verbal learners. Either way, as a future educator, I will be placed into a classroom filled with different types of learning styles, and it is my job to make sure all of my students are able to learn the material in the way they can understand it. If I were to only teach in one specific way, that would be wrong of me, as I would be leaving some students behind. Adapting lessons to ensure that all students have an equal opportunity to learn and understand is one of the many roles of a teacher. As a student in elementary school, I was always a hands-on learner, and when I was in a classroom where hands-on learning was not understood, it was difficult for me to learn. However, through the adaptation of lessons that my teachers made in the future, I was able to learn the material as everyone else had, but in a slightly different way. Just because something is learned differently doesn’t mean the value and information that you are teaching is any different.
Always remember to explain what you are teaching. I know there have been too many times where I have been taught something and never really understood why we do it that way. Having students understand why we do things the way we do helps their understanding and they can later apply it to real life situations and use the skills in the future, as well. Memorization of procedures isn’t beneficial to learning, but understanding procedures is. I will always implement and remember this when teaching in my classroom. If you know me personally, you know I am a planner. I like to plan things way in advance, whether it is when I’m going to eat lunch or where I should be in a year. Something that I plan out a lot in my head is what my classroom is going to look like. I always remember my teachers having fun classrooms and, personally, it made learning more fun.
A belief I have is creating a fun and exciting learning environment is so important to a student’s growth and development. I think about college classrooms sometimes and how boring they can be with no posters or anything on the walls other than some colored paint. Sometimes I like to look around the room, and I know especially as a younger student I liked to look around the room sometimes to take a break. I believe that being in a boring, bland classroom is not good for young students and their learning. Having bright, color filled walls with exciting things that they find interesting helps them to better love where they are. We don’t want students to hate where they are spending nine months out of the year. Decorate for holidays, put colors on the walls, write in colorful markers on the board. These are all things that add so much to your classroom that make the learning experience fun and memorable.
In addition to having a fun and exciting environment to learn in that will help with growth and development, another concept that I hope to add into my classroom is cool, calm, and collective centering to gather the thoughts and distractions of the classroom. School can be a busy time, and there are points throughout the day where I, as a college student, need a brain break. Sitting in the peace and quiet of meditation has been so beneficial and calming for my brain, and while working with my tutor student for the Village Project, we also needed to take some brain breaks. This might include stopping the lesson for a little chat about what they are doing with the rest of their week, or including some Five Finger Breathing exercises. Either way, taking time to separate yourself from all the busyness of the world and focusing on just yourself is such an important way to continue growth and learning in the classroom, or just in life.
