In my previous post I shared that one of the things I find joyful about teaching is witnessing students make progress in their learning and recognizing that I had some part in it. In this post, I’ll focus on the joy that I find comes from learning how to improve my teaching practices from direct work with students. Again, my hope in sharing the insights included in this post is that they help other educators reflect on what brings them joy in their teaching practices, then think of ways to use that joy to further fuel their passion for teaching and learning.
One of the reasons that I became a teacher beyond a love of helping and working with kids is that I really enjoy learning. To be more specific, I enjoy reading, writing, thinking and engaging in conversations with others about things that add value and meaning to their lives. Because I enjoy learning, I hope that what and how I teach inspires students to engage in the learning we do together and that it brings them some joy and adds meaning to their lives. To hopefully ignite or further fuel a joy of learning in students, I spend a lot of time preparing my lessons and assignments. During instructions I am constantly monitoring student responses to verify their engagement and understanding and while they are working on assigned tasks, I often meet with them in small groups or one-to-one to observe their progress and provide individualize constructive feedback to aid them in further progress.
Over the course of this year, I found that my small group and one-to-one meetings were where I had some of the best opportunities to see how my teaching of the curriculum landed with students.
While traditionally, teachers have been positioned as the ones to impart knowledge to students and it has often been seen as a one-way transactional process, I prefer to utilize a Paulo Freire educational approach where I recognize that both students and teachers are learners and participants in a learning community. This translates to mean that both students and teachers enter classroom spaces with valuable funds of knowledge to share and support the ongoing teaching and learning of all participants within the community. As a result of the sharing of knowledge both grow from their experience of collaborating and working together. I know that I have become and continue to become a better teacher from my work with students and the indirect and sometimes direct feedback they have given me.
For example, to keep myself and students organized this year, I often used slide decks for my whole group instructions. However, during a small group meeting, several students shared that sometimes I moved too fast through the slide decks and sometimes they found them difficult to see from their seat at the back of the classroom. Finding this to be useful feedback, I made immediate changes. I first posted a digital copy of the deck on our virtual learning platform so students could access them through classroom devices while I taught lessons. I also slowed my rate of instruction to provide more thinking time for students and created workspaces closer to the front of the classroom where students could sit and work to obtain a better view of the screen.
I think being open to hearing and learning about what students need to support and be successful in their learning, then being responsive to those needs is such a vital part of my teaching practice; It reminds me that I teach students the curriculum not the curriculum to students. Understanding the subtle but clear difference between teaching students the curriculum and not the other way around ensures that adapting the curriculum to support student learning remains at the fore of my mind. When I learn simple or complex new ways to help students learn, it brings me immense joy.
