The biggest thing I’ve learned in my first moth of the elementary education program is self-identity. Knowing who you are as a person is important, as it shapes everything you do, including your teaching pedagogy. While both how you self-identify and your teaching pedagogy can and will change, it’s still a good idea to look into yourself and know who you are. When teaching students, you’re not just teaching them how to read or how to multiply numbers. You’re teaching them how the world works and how to be themselves in that world. If you have the skills to figure out your own self-identity, you can better help pass on those skills to your students to help prepare them for their future.
The expected learning so far is to learn what it means to be a teacher, and what being a teacher means to you specifically. Learning isn’t just in the classroom, and shouldn’t just be about curriculum subjects. It’s up to us as teacher candidates to learn how to incorporate all of the non-curriculum aspects of learning into our teaching pedagogies, and, eventually, into our teaching practice.
Something I’ve learned about myself is that not having a set schedule tends to stress me out. I like having everything laid out and organized so that I can know exactly what I need to be working on and when I need to be working on it. The flexible deadlines that most classes have adopted this block have been difficult to adjust to for me, not in terms of being able to meet those flexible deadlines, but in that I’ve had to take the time to adjust my usual organizational and scheduling methods. In general, I’m good at being flexible. I’ve worked in fields where changes to schedules and plans can happen with little to no notice, and I can take those changes in stride. University work, though, is different for whatever reason. Having my entire semester laid out in front of me is something I’ve done for my entire university career, and not being able to quite do that this semester has been an adjustment. I am working on making myself be okay with not knowing everything about the semester all at once. I think I’m already starting to get better, and I know that I can continue to improve as time goes on.
Steven_H
October 15, 2020 — 9:09 pm
As far as I’m concerned you’re spot-on with the point on self-identity. While we can learn from reading about and watching other educators, we can never force ourselves to be someone we’re not, so putting in the effort to understand who you are as an educator is vital. The piece about getting stressed by not having a set schedule really clicked with me. Not knowing what needs to be done and by what time can be so tough; I find that I freeze up and get nothing done when I don’t have a good picture in my mind about what is most urgent. One thing I wonder is how can we approach instilling in our students that learning is a part of our whole life, and not just confined to classrooms and homework?