From Student to Teacher…
On this journey from student to teacher, I have grown in confidence, in professional knowledge and experience, and I have found the type of teacher I want to be.
On the first day of class, we were told that we are teachers now and we had to start acting like it. That really resonated with me, and it made me start thinking about the type of teacher I want to be and how I was going to get there. I want to make my students feel welcome and important in my class and I also want them to enjoy school, I want to have lessons and activities that get them engaged and excited about school. When I taught my first lesson in the grade seven and eight classroom I was placed in for field placement, I wanted to make sure that students were engaged with it and I wanted it to help them to look at mindfulness differently, for them to find a personal connection with the subject matter. Making my first lesson felt like a huge milestone for me, and I realized that I will eventually have to have a lot more lessons ready for each day in my classroom. I put a lot of work in to this assignment, but I realize that I will not be able to spend a week focusing on making one assignment, as a classroom teacher I will have to be proactive and work on many things at once, which is something I observed my cooperating teacher doing: marking assignments, planning for the next week of lessons, teaching new lessons, and making new assignments are all things that teachers have to do on a daily basis while making sure they are meeting the curriculum requirements. Before taking this class, I had not really thought about how lessons are made or how teachers plan, and I can now say that I have experience with this and I can make lesson plans.
Teaching and being a role model for students was quite nerve-racking at first. It was hard for me to think of myself as a teacher, but I learned that in order for students to see me and respect me as a teacher I had to do the same for myself. I grew in confidence in guiding students with their studies and giving them instructions over the semester. I learned to improvise and to trust my gut when students asked tough questions, and to allow myself to be vulnerable. Teachers make mistakes and I think it is best to own your mistakes and allow students to see that nobody is perfect instead of trying to hide your imperfection. Teaching lessons and helping out in the classroom, even just being in a school environment as a teacher rather than a student, helped me to grow in my self-confidence and to embrace my vulnerability as a teacher. You need to be confident in yourself as a teacher in order to teach effectively and to help students learn. I think this is important as I become an educator because I will be working with children and adults all day long and I will need to be confident in myself, talking and coming out of my bubble.
Teaching is a challenging profession, you need to be proactive and multitasking all the time. I learned that through my experience in the classroom this year. While teaching my first lesson, I had to focus on how it was going (if students were engaged, if they understood the lesson), how much time we were using, if the lesson resonated with students, if I was staying on topic and getting my objective across, and more all while I was in front of a class of students. At first I tried memorizing what I wanted to say and I had it written down in front of me, but once I was in front of the class, I realized that I needed to be able to ask questions I had not prepared for and to be engaged with the students rather than reading off of a paper, so I learned to be confident in myself and trust my teaching skills.
I am still on my journey to having my own classroom of students, but I have realized this semester that I am a teacher. I think that being a teacher is a mindset that you have to get yourself in to, you have to believe that you can do it and you will be able to. I have a lot to learn still, but the experience I had in the classroom this semester helped me to realize that this is exactly what I was meant to do, and I am so excited to continue on this journey.