Reich College of Education

A Culminating Reflection: Lessons Learned in the Classroom

In the past, each of my Patterson Papers have taken the form of a fond review of the academic year with information about my classes and how they apply to my future career as an educator. This year, however, I find myself wandering towards not solely my courses, but their accompanying internships.

As I am in the process of completing my student teaching, I can confidently say that I have grown as a teacher. My comfort in the classroom has exponentially increased as I gain experience working alongside students and teachers who serve as kindly mentors as I navigate my budding role as an educator. These semesters differ from my prior experiences as my homework is to develop lesson plans and write reflections, my school day begins at 7:30am and ends as late as 6:00pm, and my motivation stems not from grades but from the joy of sharing a love of learning with young minds.

Elementary classrooms are often overlooked as zones of coloring, finger painting, and story time. A smile graces my lips when a well-intentioned other comments on my ability to have summers off and afternoons at home.  This semester I have learned that teaching can be as simple as one imagines, but that good teachers – the classrooms in which we want our own children to sit – are pushing limits and delving to unknown depths. Simple teaching is unimaginative. It hides behind the cloak of an adult whose passion has run dry as they report to the copier to make replicas of a worksheet from 1983, the same worksheet that they copied in 1984, 1985, 1986…

Fearless teaching is establishing connections from the curriculum to current events that students care about and standing beside students to learn as a unified group instead of simply delivering information. Good teachers may want to restructure their approach to social studies simply because they are actively critiquing their practices and they recognize a need for change. Critical teachers are considering how environmentalism, sexism, classism, and all of the isms play a role in their school each day as students step into the classroom carrying all of these identities in their hearts. A good teacher, I have learned, cooperates with other teachers to share stories of both success and struggle, as their words find both empathy and understanding in the cavity of the others’ ears. Perhaps most importantly, I have learned that the leadership of a school trickles into the veins of each of its members. If a school’s leadership is supportive and empowering, the school has teachers. If a school’s leadership is suffocating and restrictive, then the school simply has employees.

It is my hope that these lessons will steer me as I begin my job search upon completion of Appalachian’s Master’s in Elementary Education program in Spring 2017. In other semesters, I have learned how to teach, but this semester I have learned how to be a teacher. My cooperating teacher has modeled effective partnerships with other teachers as well as university employees. Her commitment to sharing ideas and collaboration has shown me the importance of partnership. When I seek out a teaching position, one of my inquiries will certainly regard the frequency with which teachers communicate and work together at a particular school.  I have learned from my own lesson plans that students’ enthusiasm boils when you take the time to connect curriculum to their interests or to their immediate world (whether this be their class wide passion for Star Wars as a guide for a poetry unit, an interest in rebuilding their school playground in connection to North Carolina Essential  Standards regarding community participation, or simply mentioning a current event from that morning’s CNN student news during our social studies lesson).  I must find a school where these approaches are welcomed by the administration, even if this means going outside for science every afternoon simply because the students have developed an interest in the caterpillars on the playground and I have connected their  natural curiosity to a biology standard.

I have watched my students sit in a book discussion of “Wonder” by Raquel Palacio while they form connections from the main character, August, and his physical deformity to issues surrounding discrimination and racism. These connections would be lost if their teacher choose guide the discussion herself instead of allowing students to make their own meaning of the Palacio’s powerful words. If I sense that a potential job offer comes from a school that would halt upon the sight of a student-guided book discussion, then I have learned that this school is not the fit for me. Freedom in the classroom is mandatory to my students’ success.

Although seemingly sporadic and overambitious, these are the lessons I have learned in both my second and fifth grade elementary classrooms this year. They will echo throughout my mind as I look for my own place in a school in the upcoming year. I have been told that finding a teaching position is not simply about looking for a job opening, but rather it is about finding a place where your teaching style is respected and embraced. I hope to find this fit for myself by using these lessons as my compass.