“The student is infinitely more important than the subject matter.” -Nel Noddings
At the Sonoma State teaching credential program I learned to connect my values of inclusion, empathy and care, with specific teaching strategies. By inclusion I mean providing access and equity for all learners. Empathy for emergent adolescence means providing adaptive, individualized instruction so that I can teach the child and not just the content. And all students deserve a caring and supportive environment in which to feel comfortable learning. The teaching theories and strategies that I learned help me to embody these goals in my practice, and gives me a framework for naming what needs to be adapted when I reflect on what works.
Inclusion begins at the planning stage with Universal Design for Learning, thinking ahead about how I am going to provide multiple flexible means of representation, engagement, and expression. The classroom visual environment must announce my values of celebrating diversity in appropriate ways, which reflect my training in methods of culturally responsive and trauma-sensitive teaching. It’s my belief that students deserve high expectations--challenge, deadlines, structure--and a high level of support--formative evaluation and scaffolding. With years of experience working in special education classrooms and with English learners, I am familiar and comfortable with a variety of options for accommodations and modifications of curriculum. Students need an advocate in a system that often struggles to meet their needs.
Providing an individualized lesson design means I have to learn about student motivations, interests, assets, and needs. This means empathizing with their situation as adolescents in a state of emerging development. My role as a teacher is to foster their growth as independent learners, building agency and social skills by taking ownership in the process. Differentiated Instruction is a framework for adapting the content, process, and product of my lessons to suit the needs of diverse learners. I model how to take an interest in the material, based on what I have learned about the means of engagement that work for my students, and make sure that they understand why these activities are useful practices. This is rooted in my own joy for the work of participating in my own local literary community, as well as the larger world of academic scholarship, but I am ever attentive to ways that what has worked for me about traditional schooling might not always be the best fit for my students.
To create a caring environment I begin with considering how to model and design for the sorts of welcoming and collaborative behaviors that I want to see from my students, such as inviting each other to participate and appreciating contributions to the discussion. Ice-breakers and community building exercises, games and circling are essential techniques for this modeling. Practicing an authoritative “warm demander” presence, using “I notice” and “I wonder” statements, shows my students that I am paying attention to and concerned with their well being. I will greet students at the door, complimenting their positive attitudes and personal expressiveness. The classroom is a strictly enforced safe space where I make visible how to establish healthy boundaries with civility, practicing zero tolerance for mockery or threats. My training is in the Restorative Justice approach to dealing with conflict, helping offenders understand wrongdoing as harm to the learning community. I respond to resistance above all by validating and listening to the pain students have experienced from surviving in a system that doesn’t always serve their needs, helping them to name and make sense of their experiences.
Teaching in the contemporary classroom is a challenging but exciting opportunity for service. I am constantly honored and humbled by the experiences that I have in the process of finding out how best to serve in a dynamic situation which unfolds according to many contexts. In the year of my teaching credential training I watched the Sonoma school community cope with wildfires, power shutdowns, and an epidemic, only to have confirmed everything I was being taught about how to foster resiliency and be a refuge for anxious students who need support in making sense of a confusing and frightening world. But teaching has always been a galvanizing and transformative experience in recognizing my responsibility in the face of obligations that I might never have anticipated. Ultimately the challenge is to continue showing up and being present to the needs of my students, and I have worked hard to build a practice which is capable of meeting these demands.
At the Sonoma State teaching credential program I learned to connect my values of inclusion, empathy and care, with specific teaching strategies. By inclusion I mean providing access and equity for all learners. Empathy for emergent adolescence means providing adaptive, individualized instruction so that I can teach the child and not just the content. And all students deserve a caring and supportive environment in which to feel comfortable learning. The teaching theories and strategies that I learned help me to embody these goals in my practice, and gives me a framework for naming what needs to be adapted when I reflect on what works.
Inclusion begins at the planning stage with Universal Design for Learning, thinking ahead about how I am going to provide multiple flexible means of representation, engagement, and expression. The classroom visual environment must announce my values of celebrating diversity in appropriate ways, which reflect my training in methods of culturally responsive and trauma-sensitive teaching. It’s my belief that students deserve high expectations--challenge, deadlines, structure--and a high level of support--formative evaluation and scaffolding. With years of experience working in special education classrooms and with English learners, I am familiar and comfortable with a variety of options for accommodations and modifications of curriculum. Students need an advocate in a system that often struggles to meet their needs.
Providing an individualized lesson design means I have to learn about student motivations, interests, assets, and needs. This means empathizing with their situation as adolescents in a state of emerging development. My role as a teacher is to foster their growth as independent learners, building agency and social skills by taking ownership in the process. Differentiated Instruction is a framework for adapting the content, process, and product of my lessons to suit the needs of diverse learners. I model how to take an interest in the material, based on what I have learned about the means of engagement that work for my students, and make sure that they understand why these activities are useful practices. This is rooted in my own joy for the work of participating in my own local literary community, as well as the larger world of academic scholarship, but I am ever attentive to ways that what has worked for me about traditional schooling might not always be the best fit for my students.
To create a caring environment I begin with considering how to model and design for the sorts of welcoming and collaborative behaviors that I want to see from my students, such as inviting each other to participate and appreciating contributions to the discussion. Ice-breakers and community building exercises, games and circling are essential techniques for this modeling. Practicing an authoritative “warm demander” presence, using “I notice” and “I wonder” statements, shows my students that I am paying attention to and concerned with their well being. I will greet students at the door, complimenting their positive attitudes and personal expressiveness. The classroom is a strictly enforced safe space where I make visible how to establish healthy boundaries with civility, practicing zero tolerance for mockery or threats. My training is in the Restorative Justice approach to dealing with conflict, helping offenders understand wrongdoing as harm to the learning community. I respond to resistance above all by validating and listening to the pain students have experienced from surviving in a system that doesn’t always serve their needs, helping them to name and make sense of their experiences.
Teaching in the contemporary classroom is a challenging but exciting opportunity for service. I am constantly honored and humbled by the experiences that I have in the process of finding out how best to serve in a dynamic situation which unfolds according to many contexts. In the year of my teaching credential training I watched the Sonoma school community cope with wildfires, power shutdowns, and an epidemic, only to have confirmed everything I was being taught about how to foster resiliency and be a refuge for anxious students who need support in making sense of a confusing and frightening world. But teaching has always been a galvanizing and transformative experience in recognizing my responsibility in the face of obligations that I might never have anticipated. Ultimately the challenge is to continue showing up and being present to the needs of my students, and I have worked hard to build a practice which is capable of meeting these demands.
