Rian's Essentials

The most essential aspect of my classroom will be community. Much of the Delpit book boils down to knowing your students. There is a quote from a Native Alaskan teacher who said, “To teach you I must first know you”. I hope to know all of my students and their families. I want to know them better than I know all of my cohort members. The cohort system has been an eye-opening experience. I think of it as a model for my future classroom. If I can create a class that truly knows each other I think many of the social justice issues will fade into the background. If all of my students have some sort of relationship with each other it will be much easier for them to see their peers as people first. Tyrone will no longer be “the black kid”. He will be “Tyrone” the kid that lives with his grandma, loves to ride his bike and knows some great jokes.

Another essential of my teaching philosophy is security. I want students to feel safe to express ideas, even to fail and try again. It will be vital for me to model this openness and willingness to take risks. Students bring a lot of issues with them to school. I’d like my class to be a place that they feel like empowered, intelligent and welcome. Creating a sense of community will be a large part of the sense of security. The way I see it, teaching comes down to people. You can have the best-designed curriculum and abundant resources, but if you don’t connect with the students and help them look forward to seeing you every day you have failed.

One aspect of my teaching that I’ve always struggled a bit with is how to instill these values. I have had teachers that talk about respect, talk about honesty, talk about stereotypes, but they never SHOWED us what these things looked like. Modeling these things is a great way to start. Students should be able to tell teachers’ values simply by observing his/her actions. I’d like to use activities to show students what it means to respect another persons view and how to be honest about faults or weakness. I’m sure I’ll pick some up along the way… the Rethinking Education book seems like it will be a good resource.

*I also want to add…
I couldn’t sleep the other night and I began to think about all of us in cohort 1. I was thinking about all of the stories we are reading about innovative teachers that create wonderful lessons and take the profession to a whole new level. All of the videos that we have seen and the stories we have written about our own experiences with amazing teachers. I thought to myself at 2am: “Self, I see 21 of those teachers every day.”