Prompt: What is it about your approach to teaching which shows that learning is important to you, that you value growth in your professional life? What is the danger in not being committed to continued growth? Does that also affect your students or only you? Once you master something, why change it?
While there are many questions included in this week’s prompt, I believe the core of all of them is the idea of being a life-long learner. This is important for me as a teacher, and it is also important to me that I be trying daily to instill the love of learning and desire to continue learning in my students. This is evident in the way that I teach. I attempt to share as much as I can about what I am learning with my students. Because I want my students to be life-long learners, I try to relate our content to their real lives, and what they are interacting with every day, to make it memorable and meaningful. For example, when we learn about community in social studies in our first unit, I will relate it to the community that we live in here in Buffalo, New York. Additionally, in relation to being a life-long learner, I am also open and humble with them about things that I do not know, and then seek to find the answers and share them with my students. This year, I have been student teaching in a bilingual 2nd grade class, and not being perfectly bilingual myself (Spanish and English), I have had to be honest about my shortcomings in the language area and have had to rely on them to help me phrase different statements or questions. This is also my first experience with bilingual education, so I am looking into doing research about the philosophies behind bilngual education. I also value growth professionally, as an educator. I like to read books about different educators experiences, am open to hearing criticisms about my teaching, and, as a future teacher, I will take advantage of whatever conferences I can go to that will help me to learn more about how students learn and how I, as their teacher, can best teach them based on how they learn.
I believe that there is great danger in not being committed to continued growth because this does not affect only you, but your students as well. If you are simply satisfied with your level of knowledge, you are not being open to learning new things that may help you to serve your students in a more complete way. Also, if I were to stop learning new things, yet still encourage my students to become life-long learners, I would not be setting a very good example for them. It is important for students to have adults who are role models for them in this are, especially if learning and education are not valued in that student’s home. It is also dangerous to stop learning because then you forget how exciting it is to learn something new and to put it into practice.
Additionally, I believe it is detrimental to your students if, once you have mastered something, you never change it. I think this is especially important in the way that you present information to students. For example, if you think that you have mastered classroom management and that you have a great system in place, you very well may, but this does not mean that you will not need to tweak it and change it from time to time as the year progresses, and certainly from year to year as your students change, because you want to be responsive to your particular group of students. This year in student teaching, my classroom teacher has developed a system where all of the students start with a green tag in their pocket chart and then move to yellow and/or red depending on their behavior. This works well, but she has had to supplement this with other behavior management strategies such as giving out stars on invididual index cards after each subject for good behavior, and having a card with a happy face on one side and a sad face on the other side in the middle of each table group which she changes depending on if the group is doing well or not. This has been great for me to observe her coming up with new things, being open to suggestions as I share them, and being flexible-all important aspects of teaching the elementary grades.
Lia Thomassian's Student Teaching Blog 
Lia,
I love that you talk about the importance of making learning authentic. Being that you take time to share about how you are still learning, and then making learning authentic to your students will encourage them to seek and grow in their interests. This will show them that learning can be interesting and relates to their every day lives more than they realize. I’ve also felt the same similarities with not knowing some content in the classroom, but taking on the task of learning and growing to be more competent in subject material. For me, I have been looking more into NY state history because that is the focus in 4th grade SS. This is all new to me because I am not from NY. I’ve chosen to do SS for my unit plan so I, like my students, have the opportunity to learn and grow. Your thinking on this topic is deep and good, and it’s clear that you will continue to grow as a learn throughout your life. 🙂
I am particularly struck, Lia, by your connection of life-long learning to teaching ELL students. I can imagine that were I to attempt to teach students who’s primary discourse is a completely different language than my own, it would really drive home the need for me to be a life-long learner simply in order to learn how to effectively communicate with my students. What a humbling experience I can imagine that that must be 🙂
Aside from that point, I also like how you discussed the importance of us as teachers setting a good example for our students. I am reminded of that time in Lang and Lit (or was it Children’s Lit? Or both?) that we talked about how it is important for your students to see that you read in your “free time”. I believe that being a life-long reader goes hand-in-hand with being a with life-long learner, and showing our children that we love to intake new information by reading is another way to set a good example for our students.
Looking forward to reading more of your blog posts, although I guess I’ll have to wait awhile since I’ve already read next week’s post….. 🙂
Well said, Lia. You’ve covered the bases, so to speak, in affirming the need for lifelong learning as teachers and as students. The case you have built for this need is airtight! One further idea that you might explore has to do with the content itself which you are attempting to master. Is it the nature of a body of knowledge to be fixed? Or does a field/discipline/content area grow and change itself? Is it lively in that sense? This is moving you even a step further – but what you have already stated is excellent!