"I have to do me"

"We have known for a long time that as long as human beings are capable of creativity, human conduct cannot be predicted" (Pinar, p. 107).
I would love for teaching to come with a checklist. As I have stated before, I am a product of detailed syllabi, hours-long test preps, and formulaic thinking. That is what many of my classes consisted of as I grew up, and it is definitely my comfort zone. I like to be given clear directions and guidelines, and I can follow those directions to the exact specifications of whoever is giving them to me... Unfortunately (or rather, fortunately) that is not at all how teaching works! As Pinar states in  What is Curriculum Theory?, as long as our students are capable of creativity, we as educators cannot predict how their minds will work or what knowledge will be considered most important to them.
I was challenged yet again this week. As I said in class, I feel as though I leave class every Tuesday night convinced that I need to change absolutely everything about my teaching in order to be that inspirational teacher I so desire to be. I want to be innovative and creative and thought provoking and interesting and challenging and caring and organized and passionate and inspiring... and all of these things that it is honestly impossible to be all at once, especially in my first few years of teaching. Yet here I sit, the girl who could always follow a checklist, and I am trying to fulfill what I think the "perfect teacher" checklist entails.
I so appreciated the discussion we had in class because I think that it finally put to rest some of the haunting thoughts I leave class with every week that I am not good enough and that I will never be "that teacher." The conversation centered around "Just doing you." I don't have to be the overly dramatized "Freedom Writers" teacher or the veteran teacher who seems to have it all together or the artistic teacher who is busting at the seams with creative ideas. I just have to be me. Every teacher who spoke in our class this week inspired me because I have looked at each and every teacher in our class as someone who I would like to teach like; however, all of them said the same thing..."I have to do me." I have to stop trying to figure out the "how to teach well formula" because it does not exist. Just as I have to allow my students to be themselves and to explore that which interests them, I have to allow myself to do the same. I have to stop feeling like I have to fit a certain mold or teach a certain way in order for my students to learn. I simply have to be willing to be myself, pour every ounce of passion I have for education into my job, and invite my students along for the adventure that is teaching and learning.
I want to show my students that I am learning alongside them and I am committed to change and challenge just as I would like them to be. I am excited this week because I am starting to make changes to my curriculum that I think will be beneficial to my students and will help them learn more than they have been learning. To be completely honest, I feel like I have no idea what I am doing, but I know that if I continue to shift things little by little, I will begin to feel like I have a better grasp on this thing called teaching. And as I make these little changes, I am slowly putting my stamp on the curriculum, and I am slowly but surely learning how to "do me."

Curriculum and Student Interest

I really enjoyed the connection made this week between curriculum and the importance of getting to know our students. Many times, I think that it is tempting to keep the two very separate in our minds because curriculum sometimes seems so sterile and one-dimensional, while getting to know our students can seem so multifaceted and "non-academic." The activity where we had to directly connect our content area curriculum to the different ways students would like to be known/ understood was helpful with making that connection. It showed in a concrete way that presenting the curriculum and getting to know our students are not two entities that are to be kept separate. It is quite the opposite; we need to link the two together in order to truly invest our students in what we are teaching and to have them truly connect to the material. I was also reminded that for each lesson, I must think to myself "Why will this matter to my students? What will make this lesson interesting to them?" As educators, we must constantly assess our mindsets going into the classroom, and we must ensure that we are making every possible effort to keep the atmosphere positive, interesting, and motivating for our students.

The facilitation this week was very effective due to the various activities that kept interest and interaction high, which I think did a wonderful job of mirroring what the facilitator was saying we should do in our own classrooms. The various video clips were interesting, and I think that they presented the material being shared in a more fun and interesting light. Also, I appreciated being able to break into groups based on our content areas and create lessons. The most important part of that activity was the fact that we were required to explain our reasoning for the lesson and why we thought it would be interesting to our students, reminding me of the necessity of taking into account students' interests and personal motivations when planning lessons. I also appreciated the acrostic poem that we got to create around the one word that we thought was central to teaching. As the facilitator stated, this caused us to think critically and to "think outside of the box," which is what we should be having our students do in class.

This facilitation inspired me to go into my classroom the next day and use more multimedia sources to support what I was teaching. The videos I found really interested the students and got them excited about what we were learning. The videos also gave them a new and different perspective other than just my explanation. I will definitely continue to increase the use of videos and media in my classroom!

I would have loved to learn more practical ideas on how to adjust curriculum to make it more personal and applicable to students and their interests. I loved the ideas that I did hear from the other teachers on how to connect with students and create more interest, so I would have loved to have had more time to share and explore different ideas in more depth. I usually heartily agree with the things we discuss theoretically, but sometimes I find it difficult to practically apply everything we talk about because I need more concrete examples.

Avoiding Pre-Packaged Curriculum

I went into this week very nervous because it was my and Shae's turn for facilitation. As I stated in class, when we started planning for this past week, I wanted to have a definite, exact plan. For our activity where people shared quotes from the book and wrote down their reflections, I wanted to have all of the quotes chosen and typed out so we could distribute them to the class, ensuring that all of the main points we wanted to talk about would be covered through the discussion. As we were talking, however, we realized that if we chose each quote and told everyone what they were to reflect on, we were "pre-digesting" and "pre-packaging" the curriculum just as Ayers warns against in the text. We ended up having all of our colleagues choose their own quotes to reflect upon and then share with the class, and that ended up creating a much richer and more diverse dialogue than we could have ever tried concocting on our own. The same thing occurred when we tried thinking of an overall theme for the week. We realized that we were again attempting to be the leaders with all of the answers that we could then feed to the people that we were leading. We wanted to be able to find and tell the class what the theme was, but we came to the conclusion that we should take a note from Ayers and instead find the theme with the class as our discussion progressed and developed. We were able to have groups of three people do graffiti posters where they wrote down single words or drew pictures that they thought encapsulated the theme as individuals, and then they came together to summarize the theme as a group. When everyone shared their group themes with the whole class, I was so impressed by the creativity and deep thinking that went into each one. And I was yet again reminded that through the discussion and reflection that took place in the class, the themes that everyone came up with were much deeper and far-reaching than anything Shae and I could have developed before the class. This week was great for me because I feel that by leading the facilitation, I was able to try and put into practice a lot of what Ayers talks about in his book as far as being on an educational journey with your students and making sure to help interest and guide rather than dictate what exactly must be learned.

Week 1 Reflection- Self- Regulated Learning

This past week, I left class very encouraged, but at the same time slightly overwhelmed. I want to give my students worthwhile experiences, and I want to become a learner and an explorer alongside them, but—as we discussed in class—I did not grow up in a school system that encouraged that kind of critical thought or open-ended learning. I have to be an exploratory learner as far as exploratory learning is concerned because it is not something that I have had my own personal experiences with. I feel most comfortable giving my students guidelines and parameters because that is always how I thrived in school, and I personally did not feel comfortable when my teachers left projects or questions open-ended. However, I am realizing that though I did well on standardized tests under that type of instruction, all of the guidelines and parameters ended up being a detriment to my critical thinking and my ability to think and explore freely. I would like to now learn how to change my mindset… to move away from the comfort and safety of textbook curriculum and standardized test preparation and into the unknown of my students’ own self regulated learning.

What really helped me come to this conclusion this past week was how open the facilitation was. The ability we had as students to read the Web 2.0 tools article on self-regulated learning and then reflect and share what we thought about others reflections helped me to start off the class knowing that my personal thoughts and the thoughts of my fellow classmates would be central to our learning. Also, the open discussion we had at the end of class was what I honestly learned the most from. As I got the opportunity to hear other teachers talk about their struggles working in a system driven by standards and norm-referenced tests, I was encouraged to continue to move outside of that box. I was also inspired as I got to hear more veteran “rebel” educators share how they were able to work around such restrictions and give their students a challenging education.

I think that the facilitation format and subsequent discussion were so wonderful because I felt inspired to go into my class the next day and challenge my students to critically think more than I had the day before. I gave my students an assignment to work on where I wanted them to depict the verb conjugations visually, and while many students wanted me to give them exact guidelines or tell them exactly what to draw, I told them that I wanted them to push themselves to think outside of the box and think critically instead of depending on me to directly give them the answers. It was very exciting when the students started to take it on and realize that they were capable of creating and thinking outside of the box!

One thing I would have liked to learn more of the other night in class is how specifically other teachers moved away from their textbooks and curriculum and more into student-directed learning. Again, I am one who thrives on guidelines, and while I am slowly moving away from that thinking, I feel that I still need some help to figure out how I can proactively make my classroom student-centered. I would have loved if we had more time for the veteran teachers to discuss different ideas and mindsets they went into their classrooms with in order to bring the students’ critical thinking and creativity to the forefront.