“One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world” – Malala Yousafzai
Even though 2021 may not go down as the greatest year in the history books, I can personally say that 2021 has given me many new opportunities to learn and grow my knowledge in a classroom setting. Never before have I had so much experiential learning in school classrooms. Although I am aware that my philosophy endeavour is far from being concrete, my growth over the past year has made me more confident in what I strive for my future classroom to look and feel like.
I strongly advocate for diverse learning in the classroom. I believe one way to make all learners feel acknowledged and represented is using a wide variety of instructional strategies in your lessons. I believe in paying attention to how each of your learners work best and provide those learning tools for them. It is evident that when students enjoy what and how they are learning, they will stay more engaged throughout.
One of my newer beliefs that I have developed based on my time in the classroom is allowing your students to have a voice and listening to that voice of theirs. Students’ thoughts and opinions are just as important as ours and they deserve to have that recognition. I believe that allowing students to speak up helps you understand your students better as well as helps them build their conversation skills. In my ECS class, one of the skills I was taught to do in the classroom is to respond to the students with “I believe you” when they come up and tell you something. Start your response with “I believe you/I believe your feelings…”. Using this practice with your students shows them that you see their thoughts as being valid and important. This also helps build that trust bond you create with students.
One amazing thing I have noticed in schools is the diversity of literacy now being used in students’ education. It seems to be becoming more and more common for literacy books to have characters that are diverse and recognize different minority groups. I believe this is so important to implement in your classroom so everyone can feel represented in literacy stories.
As educators, we have a lot of access to Treaty Ed and Indigenous based learning resources. I believe we should be taking full advantage of these resources and using them in our classroom with our students. Educators play a big role in the reconciliation path with the Indigenous people. The way we can continue to reconcile is by teaching our students about the past and how we can move forward little by little each day. I believe that bringing in Elders, reading Indigenous themed stories, taking field trips to the museum and Indigenous art galleries and doing land acknowledgements are just some of the many resources I want to provide for my students one day.