The future

This semester has been a series of revelations and awesome learning experiences in all of my classes. One of the coolest things I've noticed since I started taking education classes is that once I had a decent grounding in educational theory and practice, I couldn't help but notice the strategies of the teachers around me and how their students (including myself) reacted to those strategies. The cool thing about studying education is that it gets super meta--I'm a teacher and a student at once, and I can look through either or both lenses. One of my hopes for the future is that I don't lose that perspective. I was talking to my mother, who is also a teacher at a technical college in my hometown--at the moment, she's working on her Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration, which would make her rather overqualified for the job she has right now. I asked her why she keeps taking classes--she's been steadily working through her Masters and Ph.D, once class at a time, since I can remember--and she said something potent: "if I stop taking classes I stop remembering what it's like to be one of my students." Mostly, I always want to be learning from my students. Many of my favorite teachers have mentioned that they learn from their students, always going into a class period hoping to meet a new idea. I want to do that.

My stance as a professional educator

I was thinking about being a teacher a while back, just musing as many of us probably do. I don't remember much of what I was thinking except that it was about how I wanted to relate to my students, and what my conclusion was. I feel like as a teacher, my job is to help my students figure things out. I don't want to direct, to lecture, to present some artificial learning experience that feels as contrived to my students as it does to me. I want to be there to help students where they're at, to nudge them towards those a-ha moments they need to understand what they need to learn.

You guys have probably heard me babble about the Writing Center before, but I'm going to do it one more time so bear with me. Working there has really been my first and most influential experience in the field of education, and the way I was trained and learned to work with students was to to figure out exactly where they were and what I needed to do to help them get where they need to be. Everyone who comes in, even if they're from the same class, have been learning the same curriculum, and are working on the same assignment have different things that they need to figure out, and my goal is to get them to a realization of what needs to be happening in their writing. One person may just need the difference between summary and analysis explained. Another may just need my cheesy simile that using quotes in a paper is like a sandwich where the meat is the quote, but it's not a sandwich until you have your own ideas as the bread. Some of them just need me to point out all the great things they're doing because all they're lacking is self-confidence. I know that my students are all at different points, and I can't ignore that in the classroom even though I don't have the luxury of working with them one-on-one for thirty minutes like I can in the Writing Center.

Over the course of the semester and our inquiry in what exactly a significant learning experience entails, there are a few principles that really stand out and that have directed my thinking in creating our unit plan.

There needs to be a relationship between the teacher and the students. This was the principle I had articulated before this class for reasons I've already discussed. I think the key to this is conferencing, or if that's not practical, well-thought out written feedback.

• Significant learning experiences are genuine learning experiences. In planning my unit, I really tried to make it follow a logical thought process of inquiry, and I think that's really important to do in all learning experiences. It's incredibly important for making sure the students are buying into and interested in what they're learning, if it follows the progression of what they're curious about and what they think they need to understand. 
• Learning experiences should be relevant to the students. This is related to the previous principle, but also expands on it. The idea is that students should be able to relate the content to something that is important to them--their problems, their hobbies, their intellectual interests, their goals. 
• Students should have the freedom to have their own ideas. I'm sure all or many of us have had an experience where they didn't feel like their ideas were respected. I don't want that to happen in my classroom. This one is especially important to me because I've had such an experience more than most--I went to school in a community where I didn't agree with the majority opinions, and this came through in school too, and I often felt like if I asserted myself I had to be immediately ready for an argument that I probably wouldn't win. There were a few classrooms this didn't happen, and those classes were a haven for me. I want my classroom to be one of those havens--I do not want to be part of that problem for my students. 

I think that about covers my stance and my priorities. There's a lot of other issues to explore, but we just spent a whole class talking about those. These principles are the core.