One thing that I believe makes for really good teaching is taking that time to build relationships with your students and build a good class community. If you don’t take this time as a teacher before you start teaching any content, I do not think students will get the full experience of learning. Also, as hard as it may seem, a good teacher tries their best to spilt the time between students to assess and discuss their learning.
Good teaching is measured in the way students react to your lessons and the learning that you see happening throughout the year. If your students have improved in any way since the beginning of the year, academically or socially, you have taught them something!
The SEL presentations at the beginning of class are very helpful in providing me with some ideas for my future classrooms. It is a great way to build some activities to bring to a TOC class or to integrate into certain lessons. They all create a sense of community and relationship building between the students and the teacher, which I enjoy and hope to bring to my own classroom one day. I’ve also enjoyed listening to everyone’s mini inquiry ideas, you can really do inquiry projects in so many different ways! The MOA experience was eye-opening and I look forward to starting my own inquiry project with a field trip. Now that I have had experience working with my own class I feel as though I am finding so many interesting ideas to add to my teaching.