Capacity of a Teacher Leader

As a teacher, I have the capacity to impact the course of a child’s life every single day I am with them.  Likewise, students have the capacity to impact the course of my life every single day they are with me. Building community within my classroom is my top priority.  Building trust, striving for openness, and recognizing unique gifts and talents all weave together to bring about a classroom environment that develops life long learners. While I am building this kind of classroom each year, I lead with intention by giving each student the specific kind of attention they need.  Of course, leading in this way can be challenging; however, by practicing gratitude, I can remain vulnerable and present each day.  Along with building a caring community, I seek to construct authentic learning environments with each group.  By keeping my lessons student focused, I work backwards starting with the essential understandings that I want the students to internalized and end with the students being able to apply the understandings to new situations.  Overall, my life mission is to make a difference in this world.  I know I am making that difference everyday when I enter the building.  I have been blessed with the opportunity, each and every day, to be both a teacher and a learner.  I couldn’t ask for more.

Reflection on the video by Dewitt Jones, "Celebrate What's Right with the World"

As a teacher and a leader, I need to believe my vision of education first and then I’ll see it.  Dewitt Jones says, “You won’t see it until you believe it.”  Spending these past years learning and growing in my education has helped me establish and fine tune what I believe and now I have a clearer vision when I come to school.  In the beginning of my education I wrote of feelings of frustration that I experienced with students throughout the day.  I would feel so ineffective at times that I had thoughts of quitting my profession.  Once my vision of my students began to change, for example, that both genders have unique ways of learning and behaving, I could begin to plan more effectively for those differences.   I began to see the noted differences and changed my vision, I looked at them as strengths rather than weaknesses in the students.  I began to see the differences on a daily basis.  My frustrations gradually left me and contentment and peace settled into my daily teaching routines.  I was changing my perception and was becoming open to who they were as students rather than who I wanted them to be.  Now I am open to the possibilities that each student brings to my classroom.  I am confident that I will find what is right with each student rather than what is wrong with them.  I don’t have to focus on all the things that they can’t do but look at what they can do.  I am becoming more present to who they are as little people.  I am putting it all out there now with them and waiting to be open to how they grow and change.  I trust that they will take in what they need and will grow accordingly.

Trust

Those people who have had a vulnerable and intimate talk with me, might at some point, have heard me say I don't give trust freely and I don't trust many people.  My reasoning for these statements revolve around having been hurt in the past.  After reading about the Principle of Trust, I found myself having an "ah ha' moment.  One statement that hit me hard says, "Trust, then, is the recognition of the Divine in someone else.  Ultimately, that is what your are trusting:  their higher self."  I immediately felt a wave of sadness wash over me after reading this statement.  I have always considered myself to be a faithful person.  I believe we are all made in the image and likeness of God.  Believing this would naturally lend itself to being a trusting and trustworthy person.  Clearly, I have a lot to learn in this area as I have never put trust and faith in the same category.  It is true, if you truly trust someone, you are recognizing them as having an innate quality of goodness.  The opposite of goodness is evil.  How can I go about not trusting people believing they are evil. That is just ridiculous.  I would never think that but that is essentially what I've been saying in not so many words. 

Since reading about the principle of trust, I have been doing some personal reflecting and have been having conversations with friends about the idea of trust to help me process the overall concepts.  I have some work to do.  "I have a choice!" says the author, "Bad things may happen but do the good thing anyway.  People may disappoint you, but choose the higher road anyway...You have a choice to make about how you approach things.  Do you choose to trust or not to trust?"  I want to choose trust.  I will begin to realign my thinking and feeling so that it matches what I say I believe.  I want others to see me as a trustworthy person and thus I want and need to trust others.  After all, the majority of people in this life are filled with goodness, not evil.