I chose these quotes from Gramsci, hooks, and Freire because they all speak to my love for teaching as a site for resistance and liberation.

I love how Gramsci articulates the goal (and my goal) of educating as many people as possible. I believe the phrase "we'll need all our intelligence" goes hand-in-hand with cultural and linguistic responsiveness and the need to perpetuate positive cultures in my classroom. Students come to my class with a set cultural assets and "background awareness" (as Freire puts it) that I have the privilege to incorporate into my work and learn from, AS LONG AS I am willing to forfeit some control over to my students and their diverse understandings of the world.

Hooks points to my desire and intention to enable my students to move "against and beyond boundaries" so that the educational environment I help facilitate is the result of a "practice of freedom". As lofty as it may sound, it is possible, and for me, it is preferable. Teaching as a site for freedom - as a concept and aspiration - is hard to pinpoint without also thinking about how teaching can be a site of obedience and unfreedom.

To that point, that is why every sentence of Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed is still so poignant to this day. I am always working to recognize when I am actively choosing to side with the powerless or the powerful in my classroom management, curriculum design, and even just in my values, beliefs, and actions. It is an epic, lifelong journey of questioning my bias and growing my awareness, and I am so happy to embark on it.

My goals as a teacher is to see my students learn how to:

• Ask for help

• Share when they are unsure or insecure

• Lean into things they are good at

• Face the challenge of doing things they are not confident in

• Take risks and make mistakes

• Improve frustration tolerance and problem solving skills

• Work individually, with a partner, and in groups

• Have an open heart and mind

• Challenge & Change oppressive and problematic value systems, beliefs, and social structures

• Contribute to a collective effort to address personally relevant and wide reaching issues

And so much more...

My beliefs about teaching, students, and learning:

• Classrooms can be a place of wonder and joy, or a place of harm and high anxiety, depending on things like how well the co-created behavioral norms are set up and collectively upheld

• You cannot learn effectively if a big portion of your basic needs are not being met

• Teachers should strive to support students' independent learning, not to "help students catch up" academically; the phrase "learning loss" is deficit thinking and deeply problematic

• How I plan my instruction should be dependent on how well it meets my students' academic, social, and emotional needs, as well as my respective needs

• My cultures and identities are only my reference point and I need to consider all the ways I can incorporate my students' reference points to make curriculum more relevant and engaging

• Learning requires a level of "proximal development" and challenge and every student has a different continuum of challenges and strengths

• Learning is social and cultural, it requires varying levels of collective efforts

• Learning is individual, it requires varying levels of individual efforts

• Learning is ongoing

Methods to enact those beliefs in my classroom:

• Incorporating restorative practices (when possible) such as mediations and chances for wrongs to be remedied

• Asking students to share with me what they are interested and disinterested in

• Designing individual projects (presentations and performances, art work, visuals and infographics, papers, podcasts, videos, poems) that offer multimodal ways to demonstrate comprehension

• Talking less; limiting my talking and guided instruction to no more than 15 minutes and/or 10-20% of class

• Using the I-We-You model of gradual release of responsibility

• Backwards designed curriculum

• Authentic assessments

• Using culturally relevant texts and resources

• Working with a variety of community members to make authentic connections between the content covered in class and the real-world

• Communicating with parents, and supporting staff, to co-strategize systems of support for students on a case-by-case basis

• Using this guide, and other resources I have gathered, to ensure that I am prepared to deal with a wide range of strategies and methods in my classroom management