One Month In

What a wild ride we have been on over this past month, my friends! From adapting to online school due to COVID-19, to developing a community within our cohorts without ever having met, all the way to our first Observational Practicum fresh with rules and regulations surrounding hygiene. Every day so far this block has brought me a new perspective and has broadened my mind. Every day I have something new to consider and I have found that it has altered my regular thinking; I now often find myself reflecting on how I learn best, how I could teach best. I am always looking for opportunities to teach anybody anything just so that I can use my new knowledge and put it to practice. I have also found that when I am given the opportunity to educate somebody, I am so incredibly proud of myself after the fact for teaching successfully.

My biggest learning so far about teaching and learning? That is a tough one. I feel like my brain has been so inundated with information over this past month that it is hard to differentiate the elements of my learning. If I had to pick, I would probably say that my biggest lesson so far about teaching and learning is that education is truly a holistic experience, and that if a learning experience is static then something vital is missing. Holistic learning means that it engages the mind, body, and spirit with a variety of elements in order to fully activate a student’s ability to relate the curriculum material to themselves as well as every day life and society around them. This conceptual method has then further encouraged me to understand my learning in the program from a holistic point of view. I now find myself constantly trying to relate material to my own life, I am almost always talking to my loved ones about what I have been learning in school, and I take breaks to develop my own physical literacy skills with a sort of makeshift walking curriculum of my own so that my mind and body are working together to digest the knowledge that I have been learning.

This holistic approach to learning and teaching has really opened me up to self-reflection and regulation. I find myself constantly reflecting on who I will be as an educator and what I need to do to get there; the main thing that I have learned about  myself so far throughout this program however, is that I know that I am meant to be an educator. I can feel it in every bone in my body. When I tell you that I am fully invested and loving every piece of knowledge that is thrown my way I am not exaggerating.. I find myself searching for podcasts and articles outside of assigned work that I think will benefit the development of my own pedagogical philosophy. I can finally feel myself growing into a profession that I was meant for, something I had unsuccessfully tried to force in the past with a previous job. But this time, it is coming naturally.

What I expected to learn in this program versus what I have actually learned are vastly different, let me tell you. Going into the program my main expectation was that my learning was going to start off a lot more foundational; I expected that we would start from the ground up, learning the history of education and why it applies to today, and then going from there eventually leading to Block 5 where we would actually be learning how to teach. However, what I have learned is that this program cannot teach any of us to teach today’s curriculum because of the fact that it is so much more holistic than it was when we were in public school. So, because our content and methods will be so much different as teachers than what we experienced as children and adolescents, our program is more so about the re-shaping of our minds and imaginations.  It is offering these methodologies and pedagogies that our own teachers in the past weren’t even aware of and therefore could not pass on to us. We are the new wave of educators.