I have made a tremendous amount of growth in my teaching over the course of this year and during my time with Teach-Now. I began the program as a pregnant woman in a brand new school in just my second year of teaching. Now that I am in my second year at this particular school, I have grown to know my 300+ students much better and have found a rhythm and style in my teaching that suits me. While I still have a lot of growth to make, I know that my relationships with students are stronger than they’ve ever been, and my dedication to strengthening these relationships is paying countless dividends.
My teach-now clinical has forced me to hone some of my already-existing lessons and note the different areas of improvement within them. I am confident that I will be able to take the lessons learned from these with me when I re-teach many of them next year. Meeting regularly with my mentor has strengthened my “growth mindset” when it comes to my practice and helped me to see my strengths and weaknesses on a continuum rather than feeling I am simply “winning” or “failing” as a teacher. Similarly, when I look at the videos of my peers I am able to acknowledge that none of us are perfect, that we are all struggling to find our way and develop ourselves into the better educators. I used to wince every time I saw a child off-task in my videos. Instead of despairing, I am better able to recognize that my failures are constantly presenting me with an opportunity to learn, reflect, and change.
Both within my school’s own initiatives and within the teach-now program, there is a push for more student-led learning, where the teacher becomes more of a facilitator and less of a lecturer. Because my content-area is art, my students are largely independent during their work, but I am continuously looking for different ways to help scaffold their self-directed learning so that they have the tools they need to capitalize on this time. I’m also thinking of different ways to decrease the amount of time I spend “preaching,” so that students can truly own their learning and remain engaged 100% of the time. This focus has definitely increased the quality and depth of my lessons, and more and more I am able to have a clear vision of what my ideal classroom would look like.