Throughout the course of the program I have been developing my own understanding and confidence in 21st Century competencies as an educator. It is funny to reflect on my own competencies, since so much of my focus is on the building of competencies for my students. Below, I have highlighted some of my own competencies that I have been developing with real life examples of growth and next steps for where I see my progress taking me in the future.
Critical Thinking
The number one competency that I have been developing in the past 13 months is that of Critical Thinking. I can no longer act on a whim or make spontaneous decisions without weighing the pros against the cons as well as relating past experiences and their outcomes to the new experience. In addition to this reflective thinking, I often find myself thinking ahead several steps to see if my decision in that moment will affect future elements of my students’ learning. Critical Thinking is important because it gets me to think of my classroom and school community, as well as the well-being of everyone around me. I no longer think of only myself in my decision-making. I find that I use my Critical Thinking skills most when I am planning my units, day plans, and week outlines. Each lesson is entirely integrated with the next, even if they are in different subjects. I need to balance the amount of reading, writing, and creating that my students are doing day-to-day to ensure a well-rounded day of learning. I also need to keep my exceptional learners in mind, making sure that my early finishers have a way of extending their learning and that my students who may find the content challenging are able to walk away from the lesson having learned something that they are interested in and can use in their own everyday lives. As I further develop my Critical Thinking skills, I think that I will be better able to accommodate all learners in my classroom to the degree in which they will all be enabled to learn to the best of their abilities, allowing differentiation to positively affect all members of my classroom.
Communication
From my previous employment history, especially as an office manager working in finance and insurance, I thought that my communication skills were already pretty good. However, since beginning EDUC 491 and working my way through this 10-week practicum, I have found that I had so much more room to improve than I had originally thought. Communication in the field of education involves vulnerability, honesty, compassion, empathy, and so many other life skills that we are not explicitly taught. If I were to hold onto the communication skills that I had developed prior to entering the program and did not allow myself to grow, I would not ask for help when I needed it, or reach out for resources if I did not have them. Communication is vital to being an educator because the community within the school is what will offer you support, encouragement, and bravery as we progress through the school year. As a teacher, it is not life-or-death that I reinvent the wheel all by myself, instead, I need to remember that by simply communicating with other teachers and resource staff around me, we can continue to build the wheel, maintain it, and restructure it as needed together. An example of a time where I needed to be vulnerable and exercise my Communication Competency was when I was teaching solo in my EDUC 491 classroom (my Coaching Teacher had stepped out to offer support to another teacher in the school) and one of my students became rather over-stimulated with the amount of activity in the classroom. Because of this, he reacted in a way that is inappropriate for school, the reaction being beyond his control. Each step of how I handled the situation was almost entirely communication-based. First, I made sure that all students in my classroom felt safe and that they were okay, I did that by reading their facial expressions and body language. Next, I communicated with the student who initiated the behaviour to see what they needed to self-regulate, helping them with their strategies. I also communicated with that student about why that behaviour is not appropriate for school, and they expressed to me that they understood but that it was out of their control. From this communication with the student, I immediately trusted and understood that the reaction was involuntary. At the end of the school day, I communicated with my Coaching Teacher and our Youth Care Worker about the incident, and what came from this communication was encouragement to communicate with the student’s parent. So, my Coaching Teacher and I co-wrote an email to the student’s guardian, explaining the situation and communicating back-and-forth until everything was resolved. What resulted from this open and honest experience was that the student now has more tools to self-regulate in the classroom, and they seem to be much more content on a day-to-day basis. Without communicating with all the people that I did, we would not have been able to better the student’s life in the classroom.
Intercultural Awareness
During this practicum, I have had an eye-opening experience regarding Intercultural Awareness. I have several students in my classroom who do not celebrate Canadian holidays such as Thanksgiving or Halloween and therefore had to be sensitive to what I was including in their everyday content. I find that other educators still went ahead and did Holiday themed work with their students, but I felt strange making a day all about Thanksgiving when a good portion of my class has never celebrated the day. So, I figured I could go one of two routes: I could ignore the holiday all together, making our learning environment a level playing field for everyone involved, or I could do what other educators were doing and still stay on the Thanksgiving theme. I decided to find middle ground. My class discussed what it means to be grateful and to give thanks to those around us. We talked about our favourite meals, how we liked our mashed potatoes, and what we were going to do with our long weekend. This way, all students felt honoured and no one felt as though their cultural beliefs were getting set aside for the Canadian-custom. We still had a fantastic week with curricular content and fun activities. In the future, I would like to be more sensitive to the cultural practices and norms of the students in my classroom ahead of time because I believe that there is always a middle ground to be found in which everyone feels honoured and we still have the opportunity to celebrate everyone’s beliefs.
Creativity and Innovation
As I have gotten to know my classroom better, as well as the school community, I find myself becoming more creative and innovative with my lessons. In the beginning of this practicum I was very focused on either activities that I have already done or seen along with basic curricular content to be used as the framework for each day. As I have become more comfortable in the classroom and confident in my abilities, however, I have come to realize the knowledge can be spread in such a variety of creative and innovative ways. For example, my students are working on their biomes Science unit, which mainly consists of reading comprehension pages and easy research with questions and answers to show their learning. While this work will still teach them what is in the curriculum, I felt as though I needed to be creative to create an experience for the students to transform their learning into real-life knowledge that they can apply to the world around them that they see daily. So, I have been putting together a lesson where we will all go outside together to explore our own biome/habitat, studying the elements of our surroundings that they have been reading about in their research. From this initial idea, I then pushed my creative limits because I wanted the activity to be even more enjoyable, leading me to the idea of making us all researchers (name tags labelled with “Dr.” and their last names and everything!). The idea has gone from going for a walk around outside, poking at parts of our environment, to us being full-blown doctors researching the land as if it is the first time we see it. This sort of Creativity and Innovation does not come easily to me quite yet, but I think in the future I will continue to develop this skill, therefore making my students’ learning more exciting and relevant, contributing to Lifelong Learning. I also think that with the development of Creativity and Innovation comes an expansion of learning in other regards, such as Outdoor Education, ADST, community-building, and creative expression.