Teaching is at its heart, an interpersonal relationship. “I cannot be a teacher without exposing who I am.”
― Paulo Freire
I believe that student-centered learning is critical to student engagement.
One of the most important practices I have adapted from my mentor teacher has been personalizing the curriculum. In our recent data unit, I asked students to help me decide what they would like to graph or what data they would find interesting to have represented for problems on worksheets/solve as a class. Empowering students’ voices to influence our studies based on their identities or interests has made a significant difference in student engagement.
I believe restorative practice is at the core of trusting relationships.
How I define restorative practice……….
Restorative practice and restorative justice are terms you may or may not have heard before. As they are a blooming area of focus in the educational sector, it is important to define both terms to ensure that my intended meaning in this section is clear. Below you will read how restorative practice is defined in the literature and in my own words, as well as how it shows up in my practice.
….in the words of Mirko Chardin
My understanding of restorative practice and restorative justice draws upon the work of Mirko Chardin. On Novak Education’s website, he defines the terms restorative practice and justice as illustrated below:
For the rest of the article and further context, please follow this link.
…..in my own words
In my own words, I see restorative practices as strategies I implement in order to build strong relationships with my students rooted in mutual respect for our shared humanity. I understand restorative justice as the reactive part of restorative practice. Restorative justice is how conflict or harm is navigated in a way that upholds our shared humanity.
….in my practice
Below are examples of restorative practice in my classroom:
- Communicating my emotions as a response to student actions
- Pointing out the progress a student made across two assignments and telling them I’m really proud of how hard they worked
- Expressing my genuine appreciation when a student identifies an error of mine
- Expressing that students’ choice to speak over a guest speaker made me feel disappointed
- Giving students the space to express their emotions
- Asking a student how they felt when they finally mastered a new fact on our fact fluency chart
- Giving students the opportunity to reflect on their emotions during an instance of conflict through a reflection sheet (see image left)
The above examples illustrate how I see restorative practices in my classroom. As I have grown as an educator, I have learned that utilizing restorative practices as a positive means of respecting students as human beings is crucial for developing trusting relationships with students. If I were only to communicate my emotions about student behavior when they were negative or when they were reactive, I believe it would be hard for my students to trust me. I seek to incorporate restorative practice beyond reactive restorative justice, but also as a community norm of treating each other with humility and respect for our shared humanity. Implementing restorative practices beyond restorative justice has made students receptive to reactive restorative practices. Communicating my feelings – particularly my positive ones – with my students has made a tremendous difference in the trusting relationships we hold.
I believe that I am responsible for cultivating critical consciousness within each of my students.
With critical awareness of my positionality as a white woman working in an urban school as well as the sociopolitical and historical context of education, I draw on the work of Paulo Friere. I believe that my role as an educator is not to tell students what to think, but to help them examine the world critically. My goal is to enable them to decode their world with the awareness to notice inequity and voice it if they wish to do so.
The most tangible way that I embed this into my practice is through co-construction. For example, when studying human migration this fall, our class studied two key questions – why do people move? and what do they bring with them? Instead of giving my students what I thought were the answers to these questions, we practiced interview skills and students conducted interviews with caregivers, family friends, and community members. From these interviews, students collected information to answer these two questions and shared their findings with their peers. From their research, we compiled a list to answer each question and reflected on themes across the answers. It was important that the students were the ones at the center of identifying the answers to these questions because the answers they found were true to their worldviews.
I believe that all students can be successful with the appropriate support.
I am convinced that every student can do well, provided they are in the appropriate scaffolds to help them to succeed. This mentality is incredibly important to me because it aids me in seeing my students as the wonderful, unique, and curious children that they are – no matter how disruptive or unengaged they may be in the classroom. It is empowering to me as an educator to see disengagement and disruption as unmet needs. This mindset aids me in focusing on where I can further meet student needs – through modifications of my own practice, or advocacy.
For instance, in the fourth lesson of my weather and climate unit, one of my students was struggling with the drawing part of the assignment. The goal of the assignment was for students to demonstrate that they could differentiate between the three major climate zones. Most students were meeting this goal by drawing clothing. When this was inaccessible to this student with a visual graph of clothing items and temperatures, I gave him labeled clothing items and he very quickly was able to demonstrate mastery without frustration. Before I adopted this approach of providing scaffolds as needed, this student’s frustration had typically resulted in throwing chairs or acting out physically.