To Know a Student is To Change a Life

This I Believe…

·        Albert Einstein, “An Ideal Service to Our Fellow Man”

·        Brian Grazer, “Disrupting My Comfort Zone”

·        Jennie, “Knowing Where a Person Is From”

My Core Beliefs About Learning and Teaching and How These Impact the World

1.     Teaching is a service. Teachers teach to make an impact, to change a life, to awaken learning in little humans that will last a lifetime. Teachers awaken a lifetime love of reading, exploring, and a desire to change the world.

2.     Learning happens in the risk zone. All individuals both big and small need to be kept in their risk zone (where challenges happen) in order to acquire learning. Being in a comfort zone is where an individual knows what they need and feels comfortable staying there. The danger zone is where an individual is too uncomfortable to learn, let alone do anything. Yet, the risk zone is just right. Comfort is there with a challenge to learn, a challenge to change, and a challenge to make a difference. Teachers need to stay in their risk zone and keep their students in their own risk zones.

3.     Knowing where a person (a student) is from makes all the difference in how students acquire learning. It is a teacher’s job to spend time with each child every day and to build a trusting relationship to promote learning. Everyone in the world learns in a different way. Some of these ways are based upon cultural beliefs, others family values. Without speaking to our students, we can be ignoring the processes that they grew up with and learn from. The teacher-student relationship is the most important to learning and without that mutual trust and respect…and a student feeling like they matter in a classroom…we, as teachers cannot make the impact and difference to awaken the learning and keep students in their risk zones.

Teaching is so important to me. I believe it is something that chose me, I did not choose it. I went into college to become a teacher, then questioned myself as most college students do at some point, and tried a few other majors. After I sat in a nursing course and I enrolled in a cooking course, I realized who I really was. I actually walked out of the cooking course in which I was enrolled as the realization was so powerful. I love to teach. I love to empower learning…especially in little ones. I have always loved being around children and knew that I wanted to teach little ones because it is at this level where students are raw. They come knowing not much of anything of the world and leave the classroom as students. It is at this age where students need the basics for all their learning going forward. Without letter sounds they cannot learn to read; without numbers, they cannot add and subtract. It is my job to teach those basics; to create a love for learning to move forward throughout their academic careers.

My final project is a website for my classroom and dual language program. This website is being created as I have learned in the past few years how my students and families are in their learning and communication. As the world is changing with digital tools, it is important to change with it. My students and families use much technology in their homes to communicate with their extended families, friends, and with each other. There is a need to communicate with families through technology, their own medium.

This project is very basic in accordance to my teaching and learning beliefs. In all honesty, it does not hit my beliefs that learning is lifelong and that teachers awaken it as well as that people need to be kept in their risk zone. Yet, it is having me learn something very new in the creation of a class website. This website is something now necessary for communication. It will allow parents to see what is happening in the classroom, how they can help their children and things they can do with both languages to support their child’s language acquisition. I do believe this will have a powerful impact on how families are involved in our classroom going forward.