Field Journals

These are some samples from my field journals about my teaching and learning experiences.

Reading these journal are probably the best way to get to know me as a teacher and as a person. I am raw and honest here, and I am ever questioning what it means to be an educator and my own teaching philosophy.

These reflections are part of a learning journey that doesn't end here...

End of Year Reflections

2019 has easily been one of the most meaningful years of my life. This has been a year of incredible personal growth. After 41 years, I finally feel like I have a place where I truly belong. I understand myself better. It was something in me that needed to change. I have been a selfish man a lot of my life, closed off to building meaningful relationships. Living overseas challenged me in many ways, but also isolated me in many ways. With no previous experience in teaching, I’m ashamed to admit that I was all too often focused on myself and generating a positive reaction to my lesson plans. I was a passive teacher and the language barrier and my inexperience reinforced this idea that using humour was a way to generate a reaction and engagement in my lessons. I had a strong creative mind for engaging lessons, but I never stopped to even think about their actual learning outcomes. Classroom management became a bit of a performance art with the foreign entertainer. There was a real disconnect between me and my learners, and that was my fault.

Except in Drama Club. That is where I feel I made a difference over there. The girl who was very weak in English yet memorized and performed Memory from the musical Cats. The boy who discovered his love for dance. The entire cast and crew of our Snow White performance and seeing them smile and be their authentic selves in rehearsal. And so many others. I was also able to be myself and form strong connections with these students, and something in me changed. I knew that this was my path. The kids there saved me from myself. Why was I not more focused on them? I have struggled and continue to struggle with finances and family problems and I find it’s often easy for me to become so focused on myself that I fear that it may compromise my ability to reflect on my teaching and focus on my students’ needs.

But this year has been liberating!!! More so than any other. Over a year ago, I asked “Can’t education itself be liberating?” in response to Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It has been for me. There is no real guidebook and accurate compass for effective teaching, but in Korea I often felt lost in the wild. Having a foundational knowledge about learning needs, child development, pedagogical strategies, assessment tools, curriculum and classroom management, has helped me find my way! I am now more attuned to the needs of my learners. I am not only speaking. I am listening. I am learning about them. I am learning about what they bring with them and what I can bring out of them.

Upon immersion in the schools, regrettably I initially copied a lot of the humour I used to engage students in Korea. I relate well with children and they generally come to like me quickly, but I have realized that the teacher should always remain focused on actually being the teacher! Helping children recognize my role as a teacher, not as friend, has always been a bit of a challenge by way of the humour that I naturally implement in my conversations with them. And this can affect my classroom management. During one of my first days in fourth grade, I initially became a distraction to the learning outcomes because I was, once again, too focused on myself and trying to build a rapport through humour. But I recognized my error and apologized for diverting the lesson outcome. Not long ago, I probably would not have had the same critical reaction and response. Being critical of my teaching mistakes and working out solutions with my peers and mentors, is helping me to be a much stronger learner and recognize errors that I have been making in my relationship building. I began to get a better understanding about mutual respect between teacher and student, and for the first time, I could truly understand what they were telling me. And that’s where I began to understand them and, in the process, myself a lot more. I listened. I cared. But this is not about me. This is about them.

Mentorship has helped to change my perspective in many ways. Our knowledgeable faculty, my experienced partner teachers, my work with Relationships First, the discovery of voices like Brene Brown… these have all helped build my understanding of the teacher I want to be. I am happy that the STEM program began with restorative practices for building relationships. It taught me a lot about myself and by being vulnerable, I have finally found the courage to be empathetic and recognize a lot my own biases and more thoughtfully consider the perspective of others. It has caused me to reflect on my own childhood education and how my experience has shaped who I am, for good and bad. Being critical of my own limitations and understanding my strengths and weaknesses as a teacher is helping me to form my teacher identity.

I believe one of my greatest strengths in the classroom is my creativity. But I am discovering that there is an imbalance between my grandiose plans and their little minds and capacity to meet my unreasonable learning outcomes. This has caused me to step back and reflect on how I can best teach to the learning needs in my classroom. It starts with understanding the curriculum outcomes, but more importantly, understanding the students and how they can best learn. I want to set the tone for an inclusive environment where children can feel safe to be themselves, for that is how we all shine brightest.

I know how I can best teach. My comfort level in teaching increases with my level of control over my own lesson plan. My observation days challenged me to take more of a backseat. I kept wanting to take on a greater role from the very beginning and, even when it was more responsibility than I needed to assume at the time, I felt more capable when I was implementing a lesson that I had personally designed. Building relationships and trust with each child helps me to feel more confident in my ability to teach. It is why I keep expressing my concerns about substitute teaching. Yet once again I am thinking of only myself. I have the capability to reach those children under any capacity. The power is mine to shape my own pedagogy under any circumstances. But it is not about me. It’s about them.

I was very hesitant about teaching kindergarten at first. Most of my experience had been in elementary school. But this recent experience has convinced me that it just might be a better fit for my personal teaching style. It really is a natural fit. I felt more capable of being my authentic self and more confident in my ability to help each child. At heart, I am a performer and a bit of a comedian. It stems from nervousness in relationship building, but it is also part of who I am. Although I eventually garner mutual respect with older grades, my classroom management skills are often compromised at first. In younger grades though, I have the freedom to use my teaching style more effectively. I feel more capable of engaging the students in my lesson plans without losing sight of the learning goals and effective classroom management. For instance, I created two alternate personas that helped me to find my teacher voice, and to build a sense of wonder and fertile ground for critical inquiry.

Project-based learning is my preferred teaching method. I enjoy studying the curriculum outcomes and making cross-curricular connections. Long-term projects that have many components help me to formulate a more effective teaching plan and respond to challenges that inevitably arise. In my short time in Kindergarten, I started a kindness project that satisfied curriculum outcomes in language arts, art, health and religion. But did it create a new problem when some children received more messages of kindness than others? How could I have better framed the intent of the project? Mr. Science did a long-term scientific inquiry about germination of seeds. Using the K-W-L framework, we made predictions and investigated the insides of fruits and vegetables, we planted green beans in soil and in different conditions (several to a cup, in a dark place with no water) and returned to our experiment regularly to observe and record data. Once they sprouted, we transplanted to a shoebox maze, which the children are currently minding on their own, by making it a part of their daily routine. Are they really thinking enough though? Am I providing too much guided inquiry? Is everyone getting it or am I teaching to the captive audience alone? Am I building their sense of wonder? Halloween and Christmas gave me the opportunity to create provocations such as a Witches’ Brew and Magic Spell Book, as well as Santa’s Workshop and Village. I designed these provocations to meet certain numeracy, art and literacy outcomes, but their greatest impact was on social and emotional learning and building that sense of wonder.

Drama activities are where I feel most comfortable in uncovering hidden talents in my learners and coming to understand their individual identities. My extensive practice with ESL learners has taught me that no matter the language or culture, learning style or motivation, drama activities and comedy has a universal appeal with children. The artifact I have chosen from my experience is the movie that Mousiour Barry directed over the course of two afternoons with a substitute teacher. Without having built a strong relationship with every kid in that classroom, this project would have never have been possible. I wanted every one of those kids to feel special. I believe I captured a small moment of who each one of them is. And I saw who they can be. Learning disorder, developmental disability, behavioural challenge… it made no difference. I see their potential when I teach drama. My greatest progress comes with implementing drama activities into my routines and there is no reason why this cannot be used to help meet outcomes across the curriculum, while strengthening their social and emotional learning. But I need that freedom to design my lessons. That is me.

To be about them, this also needs to be about me. I need to know who I am as a teacher. I am beginning to find my way. I am finding the courage to be self-critical, to reflect on not only my teaching, but my personality, and my own social and emotional learning. What I have learned the most from this past year is that I am never done learning. I owe it to them. But I also owe it to myself. Education is liberating. The more I understand about them and how they learn, the more I understand about myself and how I can make a positive impact in this world. They give me hope for the next generation. And for my next generation of living. This is about me. This is about them.

Service Learning Reflection: Relationships First/NLESD Podcast - still on development team

My service learning experience provided me with a greater understanding of how media literacy supports civic engagement in a digital age. Information literacy can help raise up the civic life in our communities through the combined development of shared knowledge, skills, values and motivations. The value of using digital media tools to facilitate learning on Relationships First culture, and restorative justice in education, is one of my key takeaways from the experience. Digital literacy skills are critical to sustain youth civic engagement in this fast-paced technologically driven world. Building a network of like-minded people and finding ways to complement one another’s talents makes it easier everyone on a team to focus on improving the quality of life for others in our region through information sharing and community building. Making contacts with the NLESD program itinerants, and technical experts at MUN, I was able to gain a good understanding of how to structure a podcast and use new multimedia tools to facilitate learning and civic engagement. Although the podcast ultimately did not get recorded due to circumstances beyond our control, the learning ultimately came from the learning process itself, and the challenges and opportunities on the way to its development. It is something that I would still like to be involved with in the future. As a teaching professional, I want to act as a model educator and engage the emerging citizens in our schools to become value-driven, motivated and robust digital media users, while increasing my own understanding of how I can become a more active and engaged global citizen.