Reflecting with others throughout this course has proven the necessity of pure reflection on teaching, teaching practices, and teaching mindsets within the profession. If I take anything back to my own school, it is that sole fact: honest reflection. Telling stories, talking about teaching, and writing letters are ways in which reflection becomes a simple community effort. When teaching—and the reflection of teaching—becomes a community effort, teaching gets better. In reflecting on the stories I have to tell, in reflecting upon my recent shortcomings, and in reflecting upon my journeys as a teacher, I have learned how to reconnect with my purpose as an educator.
In that learning, I want to be an advocate for this type of reflection in my own school. Generally, teachers love telling stories. We all have stories we can tell from heartwarming to heart wrenching and from stories that make us remember a moment we wanted to quit to stories that make us remember why we teach at all. Sharing those stories allows us to share and revel in the struggles and joys of teaching. Just these past two weeks—thinking and sharing my overworking habits, my worries, and my seemingly unique processes of teaching—has allowed me to realize that I am not alone in these struggles. Having these honest conversations with people I barely even know allowed me to recognize the universality of teaching experiences. Through that universality in experience, teaching becomes less isolating. When teaching becomes less isolated, it becomes easier for us to support our students
Through storytelling and asking a teacher to really pick a story that represents them as a teacher, you create narratives of experiences. This summer, I was a part of a team in my school that went to the Tointon Leadership Academy. In that three-day intensive professional development, we learned ways in which we could positively impact our school’s culture. One thing that came up was finding our school’s narrative that we could share to our community. There were schools there that had stories about students who had passed away, students who became teachers and advocates, and even teachers who had brought their work to a statewide level of recognition. We didn’t have one.
I can’t help but think that this kind of honest reflection in thinking about a story representative of your teaching would be a step to take for our school in finding our narrative. Even further, those stories serve to truly illustrate our teachers and what we stand for. In writing my own stories, I found out what I stood for as a teacher: honoring the students. In thinking about what my colleagues would write, I believe that we would have some great narratives to display for our community about our school and the amazing moments that happen within it. It’s only from the teachers that school culture can be created. And, again, teachers love stories. Why not put them to good use in crafting how we design our classroom experiences?
While reflecting this week, I was asked one question on one of my stories that still has me thinking: “Do you think you view your students differently than your fellow teachers?” As a teacher, of course I do. I have learned through these weeks that I care about my students more than I probably care about myself. What does a disregard for my fellow teachers tell me as a teacher? It means I work alone. It means I have my stories, and they have theirs. There’s no overlap. In thinking about creating school culture—and, in curriculum, creating a stronger implicit curriculum of caring about the experiences we provide for students—why don’t my stories contain any mention of my fellow teachers? My teaching, clearly, is about my students. I’d be hard-pressed to guess that any of my fellow teachers’ stories representative of their teaching would involve anything other than their students. In this pure reflection, there is something to witness: the values a school—and the teachers—hold in education. Those values—and those stories—should be shared.
Those values--and those stories--are the experiences we have crafted and are the curriculum we have created.