When my oldest child was in preschool I stood behind a fellow parent at pickup time, waiting to collect belongings. This father was lamenting his son’s messy cubby, then shrugged with a resigned sigh and noted that kids learn far more from watching us than from our words. This stuck with me, and proved to be especially relevant during my year as an apprentice teacher. Though I believe strongly that the words we use with students are vitally important - in fact, Paula Denton’s The Power of Our Words was the first teaching text I eagerly added to my bookshelf - I have come to find that students learn from our examples. This year has taught me the importance of modeling how I behave, how I conduct myself, how I relate with others and how I listen. To be an effective teacher, I must continually investigate myself: my biases, assumptions, my triggers, and the ways that I respond to stress. Standing in front of the class for the first time, I found myself putting on an act. I played teacher, gesturing and speaking in the ways I assumed I was supposed to. I found myself feeling disconnected and frustrated, and couldn’t figure out why my performance was falling flat. It wasn’t until I started meeting with my students one-on-one that I figured out the trick. In order to connect with students, I needed to show them my true self, and connect with them as people first. This authenticity and presence has turned out to be one of my teaching superpowers. 

​

I’ve learned more about the powers I possess as a teacher. I’ve learned that I am kind, but also firm, to borrow a phrase from Jane Nelsen’s principles of Positive Discipline. I give students clear expectations and boundaries, while remaining kind and respectful. Several times when teaching, I had the opportunity to kindly redirect students back to our agreed-upon expectations. I often heard the same feedback from these students, who would look up, expecting to see an angry face and ask “why are you smiling”? I would explain to them: “I am smiling because I still like you”, and the confusion on their faces told me that I was doing something new. I learned that I have the ability to show children how to disagree kindly and how to hold their own boundaries by modeling my own. 

 

I learned that, though I no longer work as a data scientist, I still strongly value collecting the right kind of data to help students grow. In my year of student teaching, I sifted through family surveys, daily assignments, and assessment results, and found ways to analyze this data in order to find next steps to serve my students. Through the year, and even more clearly during the COVID19 pandemic, I have come to realize that my lens was only collecting a small subset of the data that is relevant to my students’ experience. This, along with the wealth of resources provided by the TAP program, built my understanding of anti-racist pedagogy. Part of my committment to being an anti-racist teacher means that I must be curious about the whole lives of my students. I am a capable and committed teacher, an experienced data analyst, but in each of my students’ lives I am a newcomer. Being an anti-racist teacher, as Jeff Duncan-Andrade reminded us, requires that we collect the data that we care about. I will continue to add this personal, community, and cultural data to paint a fuller picture of each of my students, and I will align my instruction to serve their needs rather than my own. I will not shy away from discussions of race, injustice, and power dynamics, and in fact I will chase after them both in the classroom and the staff room, because I understand that these are the underlying dynamics behind every student’s ability to exist in the world. 

​

I learned that the learning pit is real, and that kids need both challenge and support to make it through. When I started my journey as an educator, I thought that knowledge would be gained when I gave it away - when I stood at the front of the class and explained what students needed to know. I now know that I need to equip students to climb out of their own learning pit in the same way that I would send them to scale a mountain. I can fill their backpacks with habits and scaffolds, I can cheer them on and dress their wounds with gentle reminders and adjustments, and I can celebrate their summit as we look back and retrace their learning process, to help build their pack for their next climb. As an educator, I plan to take this growth opportunity by continually asking how I can place this cognitive load on students, rather than carrying their packs myself. I will front-load my work in planning and structuring lessons to be student-focused, so that in class I can guide rather than lift. 

​

I learned that teaching, at its best, is a team activity. We ask our students to work in groups to create beautiful work, so we can use our teaching teams as places to model teamwork, listening, and collaborative productivity. Students will see me lift up my colleagues, offer my resources generously, and stay humble and receptive to feedback. I learned, gratefully, through an exercise with my colleagues at HTe, that many see me this way - as a kind, lighthearted, motivated listener with great ideas of my own. I have room to grow in this area, as I become more confident in my planning and teaching abilities. I have learned that I am skilled in looking for reflective opportunities, and that I always seek improvement on my performance. This can be a double-edged sword - I know that part of my work is to grant myself grace for my shortcomings and missteps, and I also know that there is gold to be found in the mistakes. My lesson plans are all filled with notes and tweaks and ways that I could improve, and I revel in trying new strategies to engage more, connect more, support more, and enrich more. I will give myself permission to fail with grace and forgiveness, knowing that my students are watching me then, too. 

​

As I reflect on the past year, I find more forward direction. Even my class notes and meeting agendas are full of question marks in the margins - new ideas and wonderings that can help direct me as I grow my practice further. One question that I would be excited to tackle in my future classroom is this: How might I disrupt the known racial disparities in classroom discipline preemptively, by planning how my wisest self might respond to known triggers? Through this inquiry, I hope to create a more equitable and non-punitive classroom environment, to encourage higher student engagement and more positive learning associations.