Reflections

Aves Compartidas, Spring 2025

My skills as an educator have grown substantially since I began teaching, from curating an engaging teaching style to finding my teacher voice. In the spring of 2025, I taught 60 4th-grade students about migrating birds, but they also taught me what it means to be a teacher. I have improved greatly in classroom management skills for a group as animated as mine was. My time as an environmental educator was spent through several classroom lessons and field trips at Mt. Pisgah Arboretum. I received valuable feedback from students, fellow educators, and professionals throughout my time teaching. From this feedback, I have identified two key lessons. 

First, to practice, practice, practice! Your energy, effort, and actions are mirrored by your students. If you understand your curriculum and content front and back, you will be able to support your students better. Part of answering questions or managing students' engagement is predicting spots of uncertainty and anticipating your next step. As the lessons continued each week, I found that the clearer I understood my curriculum and how it coordinated to each presentation, the more confident and engaging I became. It also allows for more opportunity for flexibility, and consequently, students become more active and excited for each activity. 

The second is to use your teacher's voice. As an emerging educator, I found it difficult to find my teacher's voice in the first few lessons. While I utilized call and response techniques, I struggled to get immediate acknowledgement from students. Sometimes I would have to use the call and response several times, deciding then to wait for the class to die down. After feedback from colleagues, I learned that a teacher's voice is more than calling attention. It is an opportunity to build rapport with students and establish effective communication. From my field reflections, I have looked back over the last weeks and realized that as I gained my teacher’s voice, I gained a more receptive and engaging classroom. 

My time in Aves Compartidas taught me much about classroom management as a teacher. Importantly, it also taught me to find the fun in all parts of the classroom. Engaging a child's passions, their interests, and their values is the key to inspiring students' learning. I found that the more knowledgeable I was in my lesson and the more confidence I built in myself, the more I supported my students' learning. As an educator, I want students to look forward to class. I felt I improved each week, and am excited to further these skills to my next students.

Student and teacher evaluations – learning outcomes: 

We measured several short-term outcomes on students’ understanding of the curriculum. For example, our end-of-the-year evaluation survey found students’ knowledge of the birds had developed over the last several lessons into action items: tinting windows to stop bird strikes, keeping cats indoors, and putting out bird feeders. Similarly, after reviewing our students’ activity books, I found my 4th-grade class was overwhelmingly attentive to their bird of the week lessons, evident through their excited questions about our birds upon arrival at our Mount Pisgah field trip. Students expressed enjoyment with our program, too. This showed through their engagement, inspired moments of awe and wonder, and the quotes we caught of students' excitement to participate. From seeing a bushtit mother bird feed her baby bird to watching a red-tailed hawk dive, students were overwhelmingly providing positive feedback on our field trips. Similarly, student evaluation from 4th-grade classrooms showed an excitement for learning about birds and an eagerness to learn more. 

Outputs and Achievements - project deliverables: 

In total, Aves Compartidas implemented 18 lesson plans across 10 weeks. 5 in-classroom lessons per grade, 3 comprehensive field trips led, and over 42 contact hours in the field with ELP students. 

Our program reached over 120 students across the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades. Families were also reached through the program as students were encouraged to share what they were learning with them. A cornerstone of the program was establishing community relationships, so we encouraged students to bring what they learned to their families, to attend our annual Wildflower Festival, and to be chaperones on the field trips.

Environmental Leadership Program (ELP) evaluations – teaching skills:

Evaluations from student participants and teachers in Aves Compartidas were essential for understanding the effectiveness of our teaching style and improving our skills. Student teachers kept evaluation notes of the main instructor, allowing them to get updated feedback. Our evaluations found that over the course of the week's student engagement rose with more hands raised and questions asked. However, as an individual instructor, I was receiving feedback on improving my "teaching voice" with my students. After getting this comment, I made it my goal each week to improve how I interact with my students and their attention. By the end of the program, I was confidently grabbing the attention of my students in the classroom and outdoors. I also received important feedback from my ELP teachers on incorporating more Spanish into my lessons. By my last lesson, I felt more confident with my voice and added more Spanish to my instruction—I was proud of myself! From this experience, I improved on aspects of my teaching that I didn’t know I needed to change. Without my time with Aves Compartidas, I would not be nearly as prepared for teaching in the future. 

Community partner evaluations - community engagement feedback: 

As we received feedback from our community partners, there were a few key reflections. Our partnership with El Camino del Rio was accomplished through consistent communication between ELP students and our classroom teacher. Through discussion with my teacher in my emails and in the classroom, I worked throughout the program on incorporating more management of the students with my teaching voice. 

Further, Mount Pisgah Arboretum offered us feedback on our program's organization, recommending we adapt a determined area and plan for students’ games on the field. We also received comments from our instructor on encouraging our participation with chaperons, making sure parents felt they were just as involved with the field trip. As a facilitator, I worked to alter our plan for the outdoor lessons from these critiques, including developing a clearer plan and system in our future field trip curriculum.