Teaching Reflections

My teaching philosophy is centered around compassion and structured play. I believe that students will learn the best when they feel safe, valued, and of course, when they are having fun! As a child, I struggled in traditional teacher-student hierarchies that punished misbehavior and prioritized obedience, because I had felt afraid to make mistakes. This is something that I aim to completely dismantle through my own approach to teaching by intentionally valuing students' ideas and modeling humility. When a first grade learner tells me a fun fact they want to share, I make sure to engage with their excitement and mention specifically that I didn't know that before, letting students know that the teaching can go both ways. I also want to model a growth mindset to students by acknowledging if I personally have messed up, too. On our first field trip to Mt. Pisgah, one student told me that the nature journals we made should have page numbers, which was something I hadn't yet considered since the packet only had 6 pages. This was a blind spot for me as a college student; I wouldn't have thought of needing page numbers for such a small packet. But, for a first grader, it makes total sense that page numbers would help them find the right activity! I made sure to tell him that he was totally right about that, and I brought it up at the team debrief the same day.

It is also a goal of mine to provide structure to the learning environment without imposing rules that cause students to disengage. With first grade learners, it is important to emphasize and reiterate expectations, and guide them to create a learning environment that supports everybody. I have developed this skill consistently with the support of my mentors and teammates, learning tips and tricks for making students feel like collaborators in the class environment rather than just following the rules in a traditional sense. I notice this in the field, specifically, when providing students with rationale for our expectations. For example, I like to remind students that if they want to see wildlife, they need to walk quietly and listen closely. After this, I notice students modeling this, too, and reminding their classmates to be quiet so they can all have a chance to see animals.

Play and joy are also things that I seek to encourage and treat as teaching moments. Often, students are dismissed as misbehaving or distracting others when they engage in play during learning. Rather than redirecting this behavior, I take a moment to consider if the action is really harming anything, or if it can be a teachable moment instead. This is something that was emphasized in the Learning in Places frameworks that I try to keep in mind any moment that I am facilitating learning with students. Another moment that happened during our first field trip was when the students I was leading got super pumped about a creek we passed. It wasn't part of the lesson, but the students really wanted to stop and touch the water. So, I got down with them and we spent a while feeling the rushing water, touching algae, dropping leaves under the bridge to watch how long it took them to flow to the other side, and throwing rocks in the water to see how they splashed. During this, every student was engaged, laughing, and smiling, all while getting to make observations of their own!

Throughout my teaching experiences this term in the Environmental Leadership Program, I struggled the most with attention, flow, and framing while teaching. In the very beginning, I had not had a lot of prior public speaking experience, and did not feel entirely confident speaking in front of a group of people for as long as a lesson or a field trip. I still have much more room to grow in this area, however I have felt myself become more comfortable over time and slowly begin to navigate this type of task. The first thing that I struggled with was attention getting. I would be so focused on getting through what I needed to say, that I wasn’t paying as much attention to holding the space and bringing students attention back to the lesson when necessary. Over time, I’ve adopted tricks from our mentors and from fellow classmates in order to better achieve this, such as using call-and-response phrases, or creating a pause that quiets everyone down. I also began to get better at reading the audience and knowing when I should pivot or use an attention-getter. I know I will need to continue to work on this, but I can feel myself beginning to feel more comfortable gaining and holding student’s attention when needed.

Another thing that I struggle with is flow, and more specifically transitions during lessons and field trips. This relates to attention, as well, because these transition points were especially where I could tell I was losing student’s focus. Moving from one piece of a lesson to the next was difficult, because I knew the points that I needed to hit, but improvising transitions on the spot wasn’t working for me. To get around this, I realized that I needed to spend extra time planning out how I would transition between parts of the lessons and field trips in a way that felt natural and kept students' attention. This way, I had pre-rehearsed lines in my back pocket to use that would steer the lesson where it needed to go.

Thirdly, another growth point for myself this term is framing. Similar to transitions and attention, framing for the next activity was an important tool for preparing students' attentions and getting them excited for the next part of a lesson. At first, I would only explain the activity in the way that I understood it in my own mind. This was an issue, because I was not explaining things in a way that would be clear to first grade learners, and it also wasn’t generating the excitement that I wanted to. However, helpful feedback from our mentors about clear instructions and using storytelling has really helped me develop this skill. Some of these tools include breaking instructions up into simple steps for students, emphasizing key points through stories, and asking students to repeat instructions back to me. I also began to use a more playful energy to frame things and generate a sense of fun or anticipation for what we were doing. Using all these new skills, I was able to improve my ability to prepare students for upcoming tasks and activities so that they knew what they needed to do, and were more excited to do it.

From our project manager, I received feedback that I was a very adaptable facilitator. I felt that I was able to quickly cut lesson segments in order to follow student interests. I think that this was especially visible in my field trip facilitation, where if I knew something was not working, it was easy to pivot and simply have students make observations about the world around them. This was especially helpful when there were students who naturally felt awe for the things we saw, because I could really lean into this and get the rest of the students absorbed in exploring a cool tree, log, animal, or plant in depth. If students were happy, excited, and focused on something out on the trails, I would let them explore it for as long as they could, because this was more important than hitting all the lesson points. 

Other feedback from her helped me to realize that I needed to frame things more clearly and reduce my usage of nervous phrases that I had a habit of repeating over and over again. These aspects of communication and public speaking are really important for maintaining the learning space and providing a strong lead for the students. If I seemed nervous or unsure of myself, it was really easy to lose engagement. Working on my communication in order to make instructions simple and clear made me a better teacher, facilitator, and public speaker. Another thing that I did to reduce nervous habits was to focus on reducing anxiety and remaining calm prior to lessons and field trips. This really helped me feel more comfortable and practice strong facilitation methods without the distraction of anxiety.

From my peers, I received feedback that I needed to be more clear about expectations and group agreements at the beginnings of lessons and field trips, and before activities or games. This was really helpful to my growth, because it would often slip my mind, and then I would be struggling to maintain expectations later. I learned a lot by watching my peers do this, too. They would dedicate a good amount of time at the beginning of field trips and before any activity to ensure that students knew what they were expected to do–or not to do. I adopted this into my methods and made sure to put specific emphasis on important expectations such as staying on the path or leaving things where we found them. I could see the effectiveness of this immediately, because I could remind students back to when they agreed to something at the beginning of the day and they would be much more receptive to this guidance.

From our community partners, specifically 90 by 30, we received a lot of feedback about community outreach and marketing our parent cafes. While we struggled to get RSVPs for these events, 90 by 30 provided us with suggestions such as sending out multiple reminder emails, emphasizing them to parent chaperones on field trips, and the possibility of a virtual cafe to boost attendance for those who can’t be physically present at our cafes on a Tuesday evening.