This year, I aided student development in three goal areas: critical thinking, creativity, and self-advocacy.  All three of these disciplines are focused on the development of the student as an individual — school should be a place where kids feel supported in being their truest selves, and schools should give students opportunities to showcase their unique interests and skills.  By emphasizing these three elements throughout the content areas, students grew in their capabilities and their confidence.

Critical Thinking

When students engage with new material, they should never read or observe it passively.  As critical thinkers, students interact with new information, make predictions, form questions, come to conclusions, and discuss further paths of inquiry.  Students used their critical thinking skills to find new ways to solve unfamiliar problems in mathematics, make predictions while reading their chapter books, contextualize important events and places in social studies, and perform experiments in science.

Creativity

Each student has their own perspective to share about the content we are learning.  This perspective can be shared in many different ways, and each student has individual creative strengths.  For example, some students share their mathematical thinking best in drawings or diagrams.  Some students might remember a concept by making and sharing a song about it.  Throughout this year, I have done my best to help students stretch their creative muscles by designing lessons that incorporate these skills.  We wrote and performed tongue twisters in our study of assonance and consonance, put ourselves in the shoes of characters and historic figures through writing assignments, researched and developed our own presentations in social studies, and showed our thinking in science through art and diagrams.

Self Advocacy

Students need to feel that when they speak in the classroom, their voices are heard.  Without encouragement from their teacher and peers, they may be afraid to share their thoughts again.  In addition to positive reactions to student vulnerability, I made sure to provide plenty of opportunity for students to share their opinions and support them with facts.  We discussed our reactions to characters and events in the books we read, answered midday meeting prompts that discussed the world around us and real-life events, and we wrote to make changes in our school and community while backing up our claims with evidence.