What makes great teaching?

  TOP Five List

1: Read/listen/view

• This strategy was very critical because it set up each module in a way that gave us enough information to create thorough responses. It provided us with multimodal materials and background information to deepen our understanding of the topic at hand. It helped me because It gave me the tools I needed to widen my thinking and create a blog response or a task response with more detail and actually pull evidence out of the information given in the modules texts, videos and snippets. It just really helped me grasp the topics at hand because they were all so well worded and the videos were very helpful.

2: Text to world connections to empathy limiting mistakes

• This strategy asks us to identify an empathy limiting mistake in a video or podcast and then connect it to an empathy limiting mistake we may subconsciously hold and write a discussion post about it. I remember this strategy really helping me understand and reflect on my beliefs. I was able to empathize with the person in the video I chose and it gave me a new perspective on marginalized groups of people. It opened my eyes and gave me knowledge to carry with me throughout the rest of the semester and made me aware of the empathy limiting mistakes I may have been making even when writing my blogs and reminded me how I can use more empathy to fix them.

3: Do’s and Don'ts 

• The dos and don'ts strategy was all about identifying, and writing out the dos and don'ts of supporting and protecting trans youth in schools. This method was really effective for  me in my learning because it gave me an actual opportunity to compile a list of things that are real, and important to implement or stray away from implementing in my future classroom. Any task that can help me create an idea of how I want to support diverse students as a teacher is always helpful, in not only my understanding of a topic, but my engagement with the topic, and I really feel this topic actually interested me by the end of the module.

4: 3 minute pause

• The three minute pause was about reflecting on the week's module and writing down what we became more aware of, changed our attitude about etc… This was helpful for me because it forced me to reflect on things I don’t normally have to reflect on during my daily life. Especially because the topic has to do with people of color, it was so humbling to learn about how people like me discriminated against people of color and to have to reflect on that. It ordered me to empathize with these people and I think that is one of the most important things to take away from this class and that's what it's all about.

5: Golden lines

• The golden lines strategy was one we used for two modules but it was about pulling important lines from the module and explaining why those lines were “golden” or important to you. I liked this, and this really helped me integrate my voice and passion for wanting to be a teacher into this class. I felt like with this assignment I was given the most freedom to express how certain things made me feel. I think so often in other classes we are not given freedom to just express what's important to us as teachers, and instead are taught what we are supposed to find important. So I liked with the golden lines assignment how we were able to do that and how it helped me grow when it came to using my voice for good.

In my top five list pasted above, I reflected on some of the strategies that helped me gain more insight on what makes great teaching throughout the semester. Especially when it comes to teaching culturally and linguistically diverse students. All of these strategies have one thing in common, which I think is one of the main ways great teaching occurs. Reflection. From this class I've learned that as a teacher you have to be willing to reflect on yourself and the beliefs you hold to be able to support a group of students. That includes reflecting on yourself before you become a teacher, reflecting on your teaching strategies when things aren't working out, or a reflection on what you can and have implemented in the classroom that really made an impact on your students. Without reflection, I believe you cannot succeed as a teacher. So these strategies were pivotal in my learning in this course because it helped me become a more conscious of the things I may be doing that could alter a students perception of me for the worse. In order to want to be an educator we all want what's best for our students, and to better them, I believe in order to do that we have to implement these strategies into our classroom everyday. Amongst all the information I've gathered from this class, the things that make a great teacher are awareness, empathy and connection. We've gathered these tools from looking at real life examples of discrimination, in every form when it comes to equity in schooling. This required us to reflect on what we can do individually and as teachers together to better serve and support a body of future students. This is something that we all strive for and have learned how to do throughout these modules.