It strikes me now, as an adult, that in my own school days, I spent more time with my classmates and teachers than I did with my cousins, my sister, or even my parents. I didn’t realize then that every game, activity, lesson, book and conversation was carefully planned or that I was being actively shaped and molded. In my first year of teaching, I have agonized over how to arrange group work or scaffold a challenging learning experience because I now know that these decisions actually matter, enormously. Every morning, parents of all different backgrounds and beliefs send us their children, dreaming of the successes and achievements in their futures; much of those hopes and dreams fall upon me. Just as importantly, those parents trust that when they send their children out the door in the morning, they are going to a place where they will be nurtured, cared for, loved, respected, and treated with dignity. My job is multifaceted, difficult, and I am elated to have the responsibility.
In my classroom, I am building a community of learners, who work collaboratively to help each other learn and grow. While it is sometimes necessary to deliver teacher-lead content (in fact it would be a disservice to keep my expertise from students) I believe that students learn best through interaction with each other. My classroom is built around discussion and collaboration and you’ll often see students huddled around a text, making meaning through dialogue, or seated in a circle engaged in socratic seminars.They build products and knowledge in concert. In my classroom, I am actively unteaching the competitive mentality that our society instills in our children and replacing it with a truly collaborative mindset, because education is not a zero sum game. We all do better when we all do better.
Every student wants to experience success and often once they do, it is intoxicating and addictive. My classroom community fosters success by simultaneously offering support while pushing students to become independent learners who carry the cognitive load and drive their own education. Here they learn process as well as skills. I make sure to include time for students to write creatively and express themselves without worrying about an outward audience. Simultaneously, I ensure that they know how to manipulate standard written English through lessons about syntax, grammar, conventions and writing genres so that their voices will be taken seriously in their post-academic lives.
I believe that in order for students to learn and be successful, we have to create the conditions within them to be able to do just that. My classroom community is a place where students are authentically safe, cared for, and respected, because in hostile conditions children aren’t capable of learning. This involves building their cognitive skills through structure, scaffolding, and challenge. Many students, especially those of color, experience school environments as hostile places, where they can’t be their authentic selves. In these hostile environments, just being themselves and honoring their cultural identity is met with punitive responses. Every child is capable of learning, but no child can learn when they feel threatened. Greeting students, making connections to their interests and struggles, sharing vulnerability, listening deeply, and having culturally affirming interactions, such as learning about student’s home cultures and neighborhoods, all work to slowly but surely build trust and rapport. My classroom walls and bookshelves are covered with the historical and literary figures that represent my students in all of their cultural, ethnic, racial, gender, sexual and neurological diversity. Authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Tommy Orange, Jhumpa Lahiri, Arundhati Roy, Junot Diaz, Ha Jin, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie present tales interwoven with diverse cultural and linguistic traditions, and intergenerational knowledge that was invisible in my own literary upbringing. These small gestures of cultural affirmation and respect reduce stress and free young minds up for the important work of knowledge building. Only when students are free of fear and anxiety are they able to take intellectual risks. They will share their ideas, offer input, collaborate with others, and approach challenging tasks with openness.
In my classroom community, I see students as individuals with their own strengths, assets, and learning needs and I am thoughtful and responsive to them. The best environment for students is one where there is a balance of structure, flexibility and student agency in the learning process. In education, one size does not fit all and it is crazy to think you can teach a group of 30 students the same thing in the same way at the same time. In my classroom, I am constantly building and restructuring lessons around each and every students’ learning needs and assets. Each student is a unique project, and each project requires its own unique set of tools to get the job done. So we need to stop teaching the curriculum and start teaching Fernando and Leila and Nick and Paulina and Jeff and Silvia. Each student in my class needs personal attention not only to develop their writing and content knowledge, but also to develop their personhood. Furthermore, I believe that education, when done well, is a project of equity and social justice.
I once heard a brilliant seventeen year old say, “racism is like a moving sidewalk in the airport. If you are not actively running against the tide of racism, you are going in the wrong direction.” Within the community that I am building, I am responsible for fighting the policies and mindsets that lead to systemic racism and inequity. I believe that being an antiracist teacher means noticing my own biases and prejudices. It means understanding how systems perpetuate racial violence, and working every day to counteract those injustices. Small steps in the right direction include noticing my own thought patterns and implicit biases, as well disrupting status and unhealthy patterns of participation in my classroom. Big steps include creating an environment, projects, and curriculum that are culturally affirming and allow students to be their authentic selves. In my class, we study history in a way that presents counter narratives to the dominant telling of history. This is a curriculum that focuses on Native American resistance, the suppression of organized labor and civil rights, and how colonization shaped modern power structures among other topics that demand that students question why the world is the way it is rather than blindly accepting their place in it. James Baldwin said, “these are all our children. We will profit by, or pay for whatever they become.”
In my classroom, I am building a community of learners, who work collaboratively to help each other learn and grow. While it is sometimes necessary to deliver teacher-lead content (in fact it would be a disservice to keep my expertise from students) I believe that students learn best through interaction with each other. My classroom is built around discussion and collaboration and you’ll often see students huddled around a text, making meaning through dialogue, or seated in a circle engaged in socratic seminars.They build products and knowledge in concert. In my classroom, I am actively unteaching the competitive mentality that our society instills in our children and replacing it with a truly collaborative mindset, because education is not a zero sum game. We all do better when we all do better.
Every student wants to experience success and often once they do, it is intoxicating and addictive. My classroom community fosters success by simultaneously offering support while pushing students to become independent learners who carry the cognitive load and drive their own education. Here they learn process as well as skills. I make sure to include time for students to write creatively and express themselves without worrying about an outward audience. Simultaneously, I ensure that they know how to manipulate standard written English through lessons about syntax, grammar, conventions and writing genres so that their voices will be taken seriously in their post-academic lives.
I believe that in order for students to learn and be successful, we have to create the conditions within them to be able to do just that. My classroom community is a place where students are authentically safe, cared for, and respected, because in hostile conditions children aren’t capable of learning. This involves building their cognitive skills through structure, scaffolding, and challenge. Many students, especially those of color, experience school environments as hostile places, where they can’t be their authentic selves. In these hostile environments, just being themselves and honoring their cultural identity is met with punitive responses. Every child is capable of learning, but no child can learn when they feel threatened. Greeting students, making connections to their interests and struggles, sharing vulnerability, listening deeply, and having culturally affirming interactions, such as learning about student’s home cultures and neighborhoods, all work to slowly but surely build trust and rapport. My classroom walls and bookshelves are covered with the historical and literary figures that represent my students in all of their cultural, ethnic, racial, gender, sexual and neurological diversity. Authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Tommy Orange, Jhumpa Lahiri, Arundhati Roy, Junot Diaz, Ha Jin, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie present tales interwoven with diverse cultural and linguistic traditions, and intergenerational knowledge that was invisible in my own literary upbringing. These small gestures of cultural affirmation and respect reduce stress and free young minds up for the important work of knowledge building. Only when students are free of fear and anxiety are they able to take intellectual risks. They will share their ideas, offer input, collaborate with others, and approach challenging tasks with openness.
In my classroom community, I see students as individuals with their own strengths, assets, and learning needs and I am thoughtful and responsive to them. The best environment for students is one where there is a balance of structure, flexibility and student agency in the learning process. In education, one size does not fit all and it is crazy to think you can teach a group of 30 students the same thing in the same way at the same time. In my classroom, I am constantly building and restructuring lessons around each and every students’ learning needs and assets. Each student is a unique project, and each project requires its own unique set of tools to get the job done. So we need to stop teaching the curriculum and start teaching Fernando and Leila and Nick and Paulina and Jeff and Silvia. Each student in my class needs personal attention not only to develop their writing and content knowledge, but also to develop their personhood. Furthermore, I believe that education, when done well, is a project of equity and social justice.
I once heard a brilliant seventeen year old say, “racism is like a moving sidewalk in the airport. If you are not actively running against the tide of racism, you are going in the wrong direction.” Within the community that I am building, I am responsible for fighting the policies and mindsets that lead to systemic racism and inequity. I believe that being an antiracist teacher means noticing my own biases and prejudices. It means understanding how systems perpetuate racial violence, and working every day to counteract those injustices. Small steps in the right direction include noticing my own thought patterns and implicit biases, as well disrupting status and unhealthy patterns of participation in my classroom. Big steps include creating an environment, projects, and curriculum that are culturally affirming and allow students to be their authentic selves. In my class, we study history in a way that presents counter narratives to the dominant telling of history. This is a curriculum that focuses on Native American resistance, the suppression of organized labor and civil rights, and how colonization shaped modern power structures among other topics that demand that students question why the world is the way it is rather than blindly accepting their place in it. James Baldwin said, “these are all our children. We will profit by, or pay for whatever they become.”