The guiding principle behind my teaching practice is that all students bring strength and capabilities into the classroom and it is my duty to guide them to access and build upon those attributes of which they already have. My own personal mantra is “We are already carrying everything we need.” Briefly, this means that we all have the abilities within us to succeed and persevere in our own unique ways. This translates to how I view education and how I teach. In my classroom, in order to illustrate this philosophy, students must be able to trust their own abilities and see themselves as capable and successful learners. 

First, I aim to create a safe learning environment for all of my students. This includes developing trust and building community. Students grow and push themselves when they feel safe to take risks and try out new ideas. As a teacher, I act intentionally to bring out participation in all students through multiple channels. This allows me to hear all students in different ways and validate their ideas in a genuine way. As a class, we build our community daily through our morning meeting and routine which consists of a class-wide greeting, sharing with opportunity for questions and comments, and journaling in conversation journals between students and teachers. This allows an opportunity for all students to feel welcomed, respected, and heard by their classmates and their teachers each and every day. By creating this expectation of inclusion, students develop a sense that our classroom is a place where they are safe and supported in their discoveries and learning. 

Additionally, as a teacher, I strive to incorporate collaborative experiences into my lessons and units. I know that teamwork, cooperation, and respect for difference are all benefits to including partner-work and group-work in a classroom. This is accomplished through careful decisions around partnerships, effective use of small groups, and by allowing appropriate time and space for successful group discussions and activities. Students develop strong academic relationships where they can rely on one another as resources. They bounce ideas off of one another, confirm ideas, and support each other. This not only builds upon our classroom community and trust but also allows me to remove myself from the role as the “all-knowing” teacher and gives students opportunities to use each other to gather new information and learn new concepts. 

Being able to reach and connect to all students academically is also important as their teacher. In order to allow all students to be confident in their own abilities and believe that they are smart, units, lessons, and activities must meet their diverse needs. Allowing activities to be accessible to students with all needs starts with acknowledging my students’ diverse backgrounds racially, economically, and culturally, including their language backgrounds. Having lessons where students can access the material in multiple, different, low-stakes ways is necessary to ensure all students can successfully retain and connect to the lesson. Likewise, it is important to have meaningful extensions and areas where you can push and extend student inquiry to allow students a deep and memorable interaction with the material. The balance between having low thresholds while maintaining high ceilings in lessons is essential for meeting the various needs and abilities all students have. 

In addition to catering to the wide range of strengths and tendencies of the learners in my class, it is also important to me to connect subjects and disciplines together. This engages all types of learning and gives students connections between subjects that help to enhance their overall understanding. This could be shown by incorporating literature into a history lesson on culture or into a math lesson on making arrays. This could be shown by using mathematical practices like perseverance and logic to solve engineering projects. By connecting subjects together, students have more chances to connect material and build upon prior experiences. When students discover and build upon their own understandings, they become agents of their own learning. 

By combining these practices and goals, I am able to allow students to trust themselves and the environment of the classroom to become capable learners and problem solvers within the community of classmates and teachers. Students who build trust and community, collaborate, access the material in multiple ways, and connect across disciplines are able to become confident in their own abilities and intelligence. This prepares them to become capable individuals in their lives in school as well as outside of school regardless of where their lives take them after my classroom. They are already carrying everything they need, they just need to tap into it.