We, Brock University students are nearing the end of our first six week block of school, and man has the time ever flown. I can say that forth year has started with a bang, and I am grateful to be enjoying it. Being invested in academics and athletics certainly helps to speed things along. My time in 4P19 has provided me some deeper insights into the practice of education, and I am excited to allow these lessons to further my love of teaching, and spawn it further ( I realize this has a suggestion of laying eggs for frogs, but I in a weird way intend it to mean the same thing as I hope my own education acts as a fertilizer for me to grow as a teacher). Anyhow...on to the good stuff !
Many of my blogs have spoken to the importance of knowing students, knowing how to present to them, how to engage them and how to put aside personal bias when trying to meet students where they are at. The notion of backward design for instruction is one that strikes a cord with me.
The notion of getting to know our students before we even begin to pull apart and evaluate curriculum and the structure of a unit, to be brutally honest, just makes logical sense. How can you expect a student to learn well if their basic needs are not being met. Maslow was right on when he suggested that in order to get to higher levels of living we first need to have our needs met. But as a teacher sometimes I think we remove ourselves from the notion of physiological needs, deeming that sort of thing to be more of a domestic sphere problem. That although we want to care for our students because it may seem to fit with best practice we don't actually have any power to help these students. This is where our fault lies, not only can simple things be done like bringing healthy snacks into class for all students to share as to not only marginalize those that seemingly "have enough". But it also means being a good role model. I think this is one of the most important things a teacher can do to promote healthy lifestyles and thus exemplify how students can meet their psychological needs.
Teachers need to practice what the preach, they need to be leaders in their communities, promote healthy eating not only by word of mouth, but by food in mouth ! They need to get away from trying to be cool, and just be, and allow this to have influence on their students. Teachers need to seek to understand how to better help there students learn while ultimately realizing and seeing this as a challenge, but one they are committed and excited to achieve. Once we, as teachers know our students we can then, as the backwards plan suggests work to understand the tasks, and assessments, we can begin to look at how we can integrate our students into greater contexts, understandings and love of their desired fields. We need to get away form the notion (as this theory suggests) of finding ways to fit our students into our lesson, and let our lesson fit our students. Get away from classroom discussion of case studies, and inspire students through real life situations. If it takes Sally 20 minutes to get 10 km on her bike, and Jimmy 30 minutes to get 17km on his bike, who is going faster? Well doesn't it make sense to start engaging our students in physical activity, getting them excited. If it takes each of these people X amount of time to get somewhere, then it's time we start getting somewhere and get our students riding bikes, Integrating physical education into math, and English into fine arts. If we want to develop 21st century skills and we want students to be quick thinkers then we need to move away from stale textbooks and mothball eaten resources, we need to get active, make mistakes, get messy (ride on the magic school bus?). Maybe it's the red hair, or my love of lizards but my last reference to the Magic School bus is one I actually strive to exemplify, Ms. Frizzle's commitment to her students learning is one that should be commended ! Her ability to harness their desire to learn, even when they seemingly didn't want to but turning every experience into a positive one is exceptional. How can we harness this? How can we make our way into the human body, head to the stars for solar system exploration, thanks to technology (even though my own jury is still out on that in terms of validity) and every growing community supports these things are possible. So let's get our students active, in every sense of the word !
With all of this being said, growing in a love for learning and helping our students do the same I think there is one thing I want to make note of before wrapping up; an addition to the backwards teaching. Know your students is with out a doubt extremely important, however even before this occurs I think it is crucial to know yourself as a teacher ! What makes you tick? How many pushups can you really do? What is your favourite subject? Are you biased to one particular pen colour? Is there some sort of hidden curriculum that you continue to try and push? At what point did you decide that you wanted to be an educator and why?
As teacher we need to start to question our motives and make sure that we are teaching for the right reasons. Not to fufill some fantasy of teaching that we lost, or reclaim our role as "cool" in a high school setting. We need to make sure that our own personal issues do not interfere with our teaching, but we need to recognize when they are and therefore ask for help from other teachers, our administration and our support networks at home. We must remember that as educators, we are not an island and we are not absolved of all the hardships of the world, and most importantly we must remember that teaching is not meant to be easy. I have said this many times to myself but I truly believe that when teaching becomes easy, when my lesson plans become so ingrained that I could do them with my eyes closed, this is the time that I need to reevaluate my teaching and admit that I am doing something wrong. Allowing the difficulties in teaching, not to lead to burn out, but to lead to inspiration for new and exciting and magical things for my students. I anxiously await the first day of my teacher career, but I also say this knowing that each day will be the first day, as each day presents a new and exciting avenue of education to explore !
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