As an educator, I believe that every child is capable of learning when provided appropriate strategies, tools, and time to apply new skills. With an understanding that every child is unique, good teaching and learning involves rich dimensions while looking at the role of the teacher within the student learning process.
In order to reach every one of our young scholars in the learning community, we must recognize our students needs, skills, abilities, aptitudes, and interests while developing our learning environments, lessons, assessments and evaluations. The role of the teacher is not only to deliver curriculum content in the form of lessons, but to deliver lessons in a variety of ways in order to differentiate instruction while considering students strengths, needs and interests; however, the role of the teacher doesn’t stop here. Although we as educators create engaging lessons that captivate the interests of our students, we must also consider the opportunities that we provide our students to apply their knowledge and/or skills through appropriate assessment tools and strategies that will be beneficial for all types of learners. By creating multiple forms of assessment to assess and evaluate students, we as teachers are provided with multiple viewpoints of what a student can do; and, with this information, we can then make informed decisions regarding students abilities while still providing informative feedback on which areas still need improvement.
In my own practice, I strive to equip each of my learners with the appropriate tools necessary to carry out a task by providing them with the appropriate information, strategies, and resources necessary to perform an activity. As a reflective practitioner, I also reflect on the effectiveness of my lessons as well as my delivery of curricular content in order to improve teaching and learning within our classroom community.
(Future edits pending)