As an educator, I have the incredible honor of building relationships with the people who will one day create our laws, decide our elections, and set our social standards. My role is to guide these students into young leaders who can become engaged citizens. Content mastery, individual fulfillment, critical inquiry, problem solving, and achievement of personal goals are all objectives I hope to complete in my classroom. Students are the most important part of our society, and I want my classroom to be a safe and supportive environment for students to discover themselves; a place to build their own values and belief systems in concurrence with their peers.

            The goals I set for my students are secondary to the goals that they set themselves. In my classroom, students are encouraged to set goals for themselves. I facilitate and guide students toward reaching their own goals. According to John Hattie’s research, Visible Learning, student expectations of themselves, student goal setting, and teacher student relationships are among the highest effect sizes in the classroom, thus having the highest impact on student learning and growth. When students set goals for themselves, the goals are more meaningful. Students begin to have higher expectations of themselves when they have a trusted adult who believes in them, encourages them, and bolsters their social-emotional learning skills. I truly believe that building positive relationships with students is the key to student success.

            In her book The Deepest Well, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris shares her research of healing the trauma of patients’ adverse childhood experiences (ACE’s). I can set up the most perfect classroom and teach according to best practice all day long, but some students will be unable to grow because of what they may have going on at home, in their minds, or in their past. I believe that teaching the whole child is the best thing I can do for my students. Teaching social-emotional learning skills, confidence building exercises, and building a classroom community is part of my practice to help achieve these goals and help students realize and begin to heal their ACE’s. I also believe that students need to see themselves represented in the literature we study in my class. While learning writing conventions, grammar, and figurative language, I try to show my students the themes that run throughout all of humanity. One of my favorite teacher role models is Joe Dombrowski, who refers to teaching literature as “mirrors and windows.” Students need mirrors to see themselves, and windows to learn about others. I love this analogy, and I follow it as best I can according to curriculum.

            “Windows” in literature are very important to my teaching. In our current political climate, it is more important than ever that students be able to form connections with people who are different from them. Teaching multicultural literature can help make progress toward this. The House on Mango Street, Persepolis, The Kite Runner, and many more offer these windows into other cultures. Even within cultures, students need windows to see who might be sitting next to them in the classroom.[M5]  I believe that all students, regardless of race, gender (or gender identity), religion, perceived “coolness,” political beliefs, or sexual orientation deserve to be treated equally and see themselves equally represented in my classroom. Literature such as Luna, Speak, and Will Grayson, Will Grayson offer these students some representation as well as mirrors to reflect upon themselves.

            Using mirrors and windows requires a different approach to teaching literature and writing. Students need to really interact with the text, so I teach transactional strategies from Louise Rosenblatt. In order to get students to bypass the simple retrieval questions from the text, I use strategies and practices from Kylene Beers & Bob Probst’s Notice & Note and Disrupting Thinking. These strategies allow students to reach a greater depth of knowledge (Norman Webb research). The Notice & Note signposts have been very successful in my classes, but the Book, Head, Heart practices from Disrupting Thinking really help my students have meaningful transactions with the texts and one another. These strategies allow students to build skills in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. I also have students journal every single day on a class website (edmodo), and I personally read and respond to each journal. Another strategy I use in my teaching practice is focused silent reading. Nancie Atwell once said, “A child sitting in a quiet room with a good book isn’t a flashy or marketable teaching method. It just happens to be the only way anyone ever became a reader.” I love this quote, and I employ focused silent reading as a way to build lifelong readers while still building specific skills. Each week, I teach a short lesson on a skill I want students to focus on, and during silent reading time, they focus on that particular skill. In conjunction with our curriculum and novel studies, focused silent reading provides content mastery and individual fulfillment. Research from dozens of professionals supports collaborative learning. Students in my classes learn in groups and pairs daily.

            My classroom is a construction site. Students are doing all the work, and I am simply the foreman guiding them. Students are building themselves, discovering their own values and beliefs. My teaching practice uses research supported tools to build critical thinking, social-emotional learning, collaboration, accountability to self and others, authenticity, creativity, tolerance, and a willingness to explore.