Skip to main content

How to keep the trust students have placed in you

  Having spent 15+ years running my own classroom, I have become well-versed in the aspects of community-building, collaborative rule-creation, and concise teacher-language which are the tenants of best practice in education. These foundations have become so integral to my teaching that they became a matter of course. What I have noticed since moving across the country and returning to Teaching on Call (that's substitute teaching), is that these foundations do not change. In other words, the way you interact with children does not change wherever you go. Kids are kids and you can trust them to act and act-out in developmentally predictable ways. And, schools are schools, that is to say that every school is bound to have a set of expectations that aim to reasonably protect student safety, require respect and encourage academic effort.
  What strikes me, which I seem to have taken for granted for the past 15 years, is the trust students give you. Maybe I hadn't taken it for granted...but, perhaps, running my own classroom, investing time and interest and effort in the students, I felt that I was EARNING it. As a new face in this district, I can honestly say that it strikes me as such a privilege, how the students have bestowed their trust in me. On the playground, little ones I have never met before approach me and ask for help, with only the virtue of my age and my orange vest to inspire this trust. In the classroom, groups of up to 30 students stop and listen because I have taught them a simple signal to indicate that I would like them to stop and listen. They are trusting that I have something important to tell them, and that I am a reasonable temporary replacement for their teacher.
  Now it my job to keep the trust students have so freely given. Here's how: I, too, follow school rules by showing everyone respect, working to support students' academic goals and enforcing rules that keep everyone safe. As a substitute teacher I can build community by learning students' names and asking them to teach me about the routines in their classroom. I can ensure safe and respectful interactions, and I can use teacher-language that guides students to make the right choices about their behaviour and their learning. One day soon, when I return to running my own classroom, I will appreciate the gift of students' trust. AND I will work to earn it. Every day.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Career in Reverse

  It has literally been so long since I wrote a blog post that I forgot how to log in here! Oops. I apologize to my 5 readers. The wheels have been spinning, but I have been very busy and very tired. For a while now I have been mulling the idea for this entry: I am currently experiencing a career in reverse.   As you know, if you have read my other posts, I left my permanent contract of 16-plus years in Manitoba and moved across the country to British Columbia. As a brand new grad in Winnipeg, I did very little substitute teaching. I was very fortunate to be in the right place at the right time six months after I graduated, when a lady at the school where I student-taught had a baby and went on maternity leave. Her leave was for one year, beginning on the last day of school before the winter break. I was hired to teach from December to December.   It was a Grade 6 class, and the first six months was something of a trial-by-fire. My university courses had not at all prep...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ten Things I Learned from my First Two Weeks in Gr 1-2

10) These tiny humans need direct instruction and continuous feedback about self-control. They may need to be reminded every day before every transition that you expect them to respect personal space. They may need you to control the “traffic” flow in the classroom. They may need you to scaffold their routines such as classroom clean-up so that not so many tiny humans are moving chairs, or brooms, or materials at once. 9) Teach them to ask you if they want a hug, otherwise, you will have little hands and clingy bodies in your personal space all the time. They can say, “Excuse me, I need a hug please.” 8) Tiny humans have big feelings. And they often do not know how to cope with them. This manifests in tears, outrage, raucous laughter, and pushing/shoving/grabbing, etcetera – sometimes all at once. What can you do about this? Well, just like your own children, they are entitled to their feelings. Let them have their feelings, but teach them some strategies for coping appropri...
Post a Comment
Read more

Unit Planning: It’s Not What You Thought It Would Be

         During university professors drilled this process into me: read the curriculum, plan the unit, plan the assessment, reflect on your teaching. It was a cycle repeated in every Curriculum and Instruction class. My friends and I could site curriculum outcomes and whip together an impressive series of lessons in a flash. Through 16 years of experience, I have learned that this is certainly NOT all there is to it. Unit planning remains one of my favourite tasks in teaching. It is the dreaming phase. It is that time before instruction, that time before you may have met your students, that time when all is fresh, exciting and possible! But do you know what it also is? It is the time for focus, restraint and actually…leaving things just a little un-planned. Let me explain. What so many of my university professors failed to teach me as an undergrad is that teacher reflection should be about two things: 1) what are the students learning and to what degree are ...
Post a Comment
Read more