Reflections on Teaching Experiences
My time teaching with the Environmental Leadership Program, Aves Compartidas in Spring of 2022 has been one of the most rewarding and inspiring experiences in my life. This opportunity confirmed my passion for teaching and allowed me to translate my education into action that has impacted the lives of 148 individual students and many more to come. Throughout the intensive 7 weeks in the classroom, my teaching philosophy has taken shape and solidified rapidly as I have been able to synthesize my education background into the formal classroom. My team and I have learned the importance of flexibility, thoroughness, and presence while teaching in the classroom which has proven to be even more challenging, and rewarding, than I had anticipated.
I had the intention of making the class a welcoming and safe environment for the students. On the first day of teaching, I instructed a lesson in which students became oriented to North American geography, their location in the space, as well as the migration pattern of the rufous hummingbird; the species we highlighted throughout our 7 week program. This lesson also included multimodal learning strategies that allowed us to get a sense of the ability levels of the class. To our surprise, many of the tasks we had expected to be simple to complete at the 3rd grade level proved to be much more challenging for this group of children. It immediately became evident that detailed scaffolding of our lessons was vital to student understanding and retention from the moment we entered the classroom and began to evaluate students ability levels. Finding the balance between challenge and support was difficult, but the more lessons we taught, the more we began to find each student’s individual needs and tailor our instruction to them.
As a team and as individuals, our ability to adapt in the face of many unforeseen challenges like this was crucial to our success. Every day we faced behavioral issues, scheduling changes, and lack of materials, which meant that adaptability and flexibility were absolutely essential to this program. Because so much of our learning took place in the field. I learned that teaching is never predictable, and to be successful, I needed to be present and calm in the face of any obstacle that presented itself. Thorough planning of materials, lesson plans, and all of the things that were within our control was very important, but beyond this, we needed the space and agility to continue to learn and adapt.
One of the main lessons I learned while teaching and will take with we into my career as an educator is that children want to learn. When we brought energy and excitement into the classroom this would always be reciprocated in a way that I could not have predicted. To hear students share their stories about bird encounters or excitedly recite the information that had learned with us last week was extremely rewarding and I feel strongly that we were able to foster passions for nature that will last a lifetime.
Teaching Evaluations
The main piece of feedback I would continue to receive from peers and teachers throughout the program was to heavily scaffold lessons and plan the distribution of materials to maintain classroom order and allow the focus of the day to be on learning. This feedback was very valuable because adapting to the age group proved to be a challenge. With the support of this feedback and the observation of other grader, I learned that detailed expectations for students of the tasks we would perform was very helpful to their success and understanding. Using pre-corrects, and pre-organized materials, lessons became smoother, with fewer interruptions. This feedback also clarified to me that moments where I felt that the class was unorganized or chaotic, often the most learning was occurring independently. It was hard to embrace self-directed learning because of the way it de-centres the teacher and re-centeres the focus of the students on themselves and their work. The value of this type of learning became clearer when hearing reflections from peers about the success of having students learn this way. It helped me to realize students’ desire to learn and how I can embrace that rather than discourage it. Having student observers was helpful in allowing me to realize when my attention may have been too concentrated in certain areas and lacking for certain students or classroom issues. Their reminders of the students who were waiting for directions or hadn’t received as much feedback was very useful, and reminded me that my attention and inclusion of all students should be a constant focus as I am teaching.
Comments from the teachers would often encourage the inclusion of more Spanish and suggestions of new facilitation techniques. As our team became more comfortable in front of the classroom, we discovered that in order to most effectively maintain accuracy, highlighting Spanish vocabulary over the use of English vocabulary was a more attainable goal than instructing in Spanish. A few of the suggested facilitation techniques included waiting for a class’s full attention before moving on, having clear expectations for student behavior and tasks, and providing specific feedback to students regarding their work. This feedback was very helpful my development as a teacher and I was able to clarify many of the education psychology concepts that are presented to me while obtaining my degree in Educational Foundations. Positive feedback would often reflect the value of our use of multi-modal teaching with art, movement, storytelling, and connection with nature. Activities such as our ‘Act it Out’ game allowed students to explore their connection to nature using their bodies and senses. Many students who may not feel excited by traditional classroom activities were able to come out of their shells’ and engage with the many different activities we offered. Feedback reflected the value of teaching in this way on the students we worked with; an impact we were able to observe first hand.
Feedback from our Professor Dr. Katie Lynch and project manager Katie Russell followed the theme of organization. It became clear that this was something I needed to focus my energy on in order to be successful, and eliminate distractions such as material or technical malfunctions. This improved throughout the experience but as a future teacher this will be something I continue to expand on in my development. I was happy to receive positive feedback regarding my energy in the classroom and student engagement which was very encouraging for my path as a future teacher.
