The following post summarizes a documentation of my teaching journey throughout the Bachelor of Education program at The University of British Columbia. This post will explore the following questions:
Where have I come from? What are my educational commitments? What have I learned from this year’s inquiry process? How will I continue to grow professionally?
1. Professional Identity: Who am I as a developing professional?
Where do I come from?
I come from a family of educators who have always supported the choices I make. The strongest value they instilled in me is staying determined even when things go astray. This notion of resilience is what I work on everyday throughout both my personal and professional life. I have had many intersections with the local community that have inspired my teaching career. For example, I was a community leader at the University of Victoria in the dormitories. I enjoyed helping 1st year students navigate both the triumphs and struggles of university. I was both a role model and support system for many students. Thus, this inspired me to pursue a helping profession like teaching. This experience has many parallels with the teaching profession as well. This positive experience influenced and helped me formulate my goals as an educator as well.
Symbol for my development: Caution Sign
This caution sign represents the transition in mindset and practice I had halfway through my practicum. My initial lessons in my long practicum were fairly cautious and I did not step outside of my comfort zone very much. I wanted to make sure I had a good handle on my classroom management and was hesitant to take more risks. However, I realized to experience growth in any profession, you must take risks. Thus, as my practicum progressed I became less cautious and took more risks in my lesson planning. Though all my lessons did not turn out as planned, I focussed on being resilient. This mindset shift from being cautious to more ambitious and risk taking was an important step on my journey.
2. Philosophy: What are my educational commitments?
“They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel” (Carl W Buechner). This quote illustrates the core of my teaching philosophy. I aspire to be a teacher because of the interpersonal relationships that I have made with teachers throughout my own educational journey. I believe that the personal relationships that teachers build together with students are the heart of the educational learning journey. I believe the most important purpose for schooling is to learn how to articulate and share our thoughts, opinions and beliefs in a respectful and meaningful way. This begins with establishing positive relationships with and among students. The position and privilege we hold as teachers can never be taken for granted. I believe we are role models for our students and can scaffold the development of social and emotional learning as well as academics.
My teaching philosophy has developed and changed throughout the course of this year. Before practicum I had ideas about my teaching philosophy. For example, I believed in supporting individual needs and teaching the ‘hidden curriculum.’ However, it was during my practicum where my focus of my teaching philosophy began to shift. The shift in focus was mainly due to my interest in my inquiry project and the experience I had with the students in the classroom.
My teaching philosophy is centred on facilitating an inclusive learning environment where students flourish and prosper. This is built through my commitment to develop a space where students can voice their opinions and be the centre of their own learning. Through hands on activities, reflecting and differentiating for all learners this is possible. My personal inquiry question and project, focuses on how teachers can foster resilience in the classroom and is closely connected to the values of my teaching philosophy. Throughout my practicum, I implemented strategies of goal setting and self-reflection to support student resilience and to encourage students to have agency in their learning. My commitment to encouraging and supporting student resilience was strength throughout my practicum. I am an educator whose focus on personalized learning and supporting resilience can facilitate an environment for students to inquire, learn and grow.
I strongly believe in using our student’s interests to hook their engagement and participation in learning. Celebrating student interest and diversity is essential in establishing positive relationships with students. Encouraging and supporting student participation in a wide range of extracurricular activities is essential to their overall development. I believe teachers have an important role in providing these learning opportunities both within and outside of the classroom. As I move forward in my teaching career, I hope to work towards encouraging these values in my students. I plan to encourage and provide extracurricular opportunities for my students. I will volunteer to coach sports team and I would love to facilitate a scrapbooking club. I hope my showing students my interests and passions, I can encourage them to pursue theirs.
3. What have I learned from this year?
My teaching philosophy reflects my goals and commitments as an educator. I will strive to create an inclusive learning that encourages student voice. Thus, at the beginning of the year I will work with my students to create a class charter. I did this half way through my practicum, however I don’t think it was as effective as it could have been. I think implementing a class charter at the beginning of the year would allow students to have consistency and accountability throughout the whole year. I would like to create an inclusive and positive classroom climate that is long term. Thus, I think this needs to happen at the beginning of the year.
I also want to encourage student voice in the classroom. In my practicum, I often gave students choice in the projects and activities. In the future, I would like to collaborate more with my students in terms of assessment. I would usually create rubrics on my own. However, after talking with other teacher candidates, I see value in creating rubrics with students together. In the future, I would like to implement this with my students to encourage student voice.
Throughout this year, I have had a lot of opportunity to reflect and grow through my inquiry process and project. My inquiry focuses on how teachers can foster resilience in the classroom. I specifically looked at strategies teachers can use to support student resilience. In EPSE 308, I learned about how risk in our students intersects with resilience. Throughout my practicum, I explored how resilience can be supported for all our students. This is when I implemented goal setting with my students for tasks. Through my research, I realized that all students need support building resilience, not only students who are deemed at risk. My biggest learning experience through my inquiry project was presenting at the Investigating our Practices conference at UBC this year. This experience allowed me to share my inquiry with educators in various fields. For example, I presented among administrators, educational psychologists, school counsellors, special educational assistants and teachers. Through my scenario based presentation we explored strategies to support student resilience. The diverse nature of my audience members contributed various perspectives into my inquiry. Through this process, I was able to look at student resilience from more than one lense. In the future, I plan to continue implementing strategies from my inquiry project with the students in my classrooms. I would like to teach kids the inquiry learning framework to support their learning and overall personal resilience.
4. How will I continue to grow professionally?
As I continue to grow and move forward in the teaching profession, there are many questions and ideas I would like to pursue. My strength as a growing professional include accepting constructive feedback quite well. I am always willing to learn from others and grow as a teacher. I think this strength and openness will help me continue to grow and develop in the profession. While I do want to continue working on my inquiry project, I am also very interested in creating units to support all learners. I found this quite challenging to do solely on my own throughout my practicum. Thus, I have gained an appreciation for collaborating with teachers in unit planning and design.I was introduced to the universal design (UDL) learning platform during a professional development day. I think this way of designing and planning for all learners is key to providing the necessary scaffolding for our students to succeed. In the future, I would like to continue working with the UDL model of design. Throughout my practicum, I have understood the importance of supporting social and emotional learning among our students. In the future, I would like to attend professional development workshops or courses to learn some strategies to support SEL within the classroom.