My motivation
to teach is driven by my conviction that every child has the right to be taught to achieve his or her highest ability. My teaching practice will be values-guided and based on the “Great Expectations” model where one strives to continue to develop new visions of what is possible for students. I feel that every student provides positive contributions, and that as a teacher my goal should be to provide for these opportunities. We must identify and build from the strengths of each student. We make it a choice as teachers to have great expectations.
I am a firm believer in Anne Donnellan's great expectations criterion of the “least dangerous assumption”: that, as educators, we must base our decisions on practice that will have the “least dangerous effect on the likelihood that students will be able to function independently as adults” (Anne Donnellan, 1984). The goal of all educators should be to ensure our children experience an unhindered role as members of society--in other words, full citizenship.
Education is empowerment that is built from experiencing success that then leads to sharing that accomplishment with others, thus building the community that supports citizenship. Working as a dance therapist, I experienced dance as a metaphor for community and saw firsthand that ritual is important for emotional growth. It is critical for children with special needs to have their accomplishments and transitions in life acknowledged. Keen observation is also important in working with children with any disability, and growth is supported by strings of previously successful small steps. The classroom is one of the first communities a child experiences, and it is therefore critical for teachers to use it as an environment to facilitate positive experiences that are acknowledged. Our classrooms are a means of creating connections among students and families to the school as a whole and finally to the larger community. That connection is the first step to active membership.
Full citizenship leads to self-determination, which means that a child needs to be able to choose how they participate. Our role as teachers is to help students base goals on their interests, abilities and needs. These aspects of goal setting lead to experiencing a higher quality of life as a child and later on as an adult. I feel that as an educator, the understanding of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is imperative, as they are the basic elements to becoming self-determined. We need to know whether these needs are being met in order to assure that we can motivate a child in the first place. A child that is not getting (first) their physiological needs, (second) their security needs, and (last but not least) love, belonging, and esteem, self-actualization cannot be realized.
Cultural responsiveness is also a key element of my philosophy, and plays just as essential a role as the expectations, citizenship and needs support mentioned above. We create an open and trusting classroom by building on the culture of the students in the classroom. Michael Lamb’s “Four ‘R’ Approach” to cultural responsiveness will be guiding me through my practice as a teacher. We as teachers need to commit to self-reflection in order to address where our own cultural judgments are coming from. To begin, we hold to the belief that respect is essential to all humanity. Relationship building is important to culturally responsive instruction as we learn about the families of our students, and share our own backgrounds as well. Rigor helps students gain a sense of control over their environment. Finally, resilience is the key to overcoming obstacles. As Lisa Delpit states in her book Other Peoples’ Children, “We need to embrace the worlds from which their children come, while at the same time teaching them what they need to know to succeed in the broader, dominant culture.”
to teach is driven by my conviction that every child has the right to be taught to achieve his or her highest ability. My teaching practice will be values-guided and based on the “Great Expectations” model where one strives to continue to develop new visions of what is possible for students. I feel that every student provides positive contributions, and that as a teacher my goal should be to provide for these opportunities. We must identify and build from the strengths of each student. We make it a choice as teachers to have great expectations.
I am a firm believer in Anne Donnellan's great expectations criterion of the “least dangerous assumption”: that, as educators, we must base our decisions on practice that will have the “least dangerous effect on the likelihood that students will be able to function independently as adults” (Anne Donnellan, 1984). The goal of all educators should be to ensure our children experience an unhindered role as members of society--in other words, full citizenship.
Education is empowerment that is built from experiencing success that then leads to sharing that accomplishment with others, thus building the community that supports citizenship. Working as a dance therapist, I experienced dance as a metaphor for community and saw firsthand that ritual is important for emotional growth. It is critical for children with special needs to have their accomplishments and transitions in life acknowledged. Keen observation is also important in working with children with any disability, and growth is supported by strings of previously successful small steps. The classroom is one of the first communities a child experiences, and it is therefore critical for teachers to use it as an environment to facilitate positive experiences that are acknowledged. Our classrooms are a means of creating connections among students and families to the school as a whole and finally to the larger community. That connection is the first step to active membership.
Full citizenship leads to self-determination, which means that a child needs to be able to choose how they participate. Our role as teachers is to help students base goals on their interests, abilities and needs. These aspects of goal setting lead to experiencing a higher quality of life as a child and later on as an adult. I feel that as an educator, the understanding of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is imperative, as they are the basic elements to becoming self-determined. We need to know whether these needs are being met in order to assure that we can motivate a child in the first place. A child that is not getting (first) their physiological needs, (second) their security needs, and (last but not least) love, belonging, and esteem, self-actualization cannot be realized.
Cultural responsiveness is also a key element of my philosophy, and plays just as essential a role as the expectations, citizenship and needs support mentioned above. We create an open and trusting classroom by building on the culture of the students in the classroom. Michael Lamb’s “Four ‘R’ Approach” to cultural responsiveness will be guiding me through my practice as a teacher. We as teachers need to commit to self-reflection in order to address where our own cultural judgments are coming from. To begin, we hold to the belief that respect is essential to all humanity. Relationship building is important to culturally responsive instruction as we learn about the families of our students, and share our own backgrounds as well. Rigor helps students gain a sense of control over their environment. Finally, resilience is the key to overcoming obstacles. As Lisa Delpit states in her book Other Peoples’ Children, “We need to embrace the worlds from which their children come, while at the same time teaching them what they need to know to succeed in the broader, dominant culture.”