Afternoon Pages: What do you, too, believe?

I believe that all students have the right to an education that provides enough intellectual challenge and support to nurture each student’s growth. As all students learn at different paces, as well as through different techniques, I find it important for teachers to adapt lesson plans to meet multiple students’ needs, and continue to switch it up to make learning accessible, as well as exciting.

When I was in high school, I was notorious for tuning out lecturing teachers. However, I was also in an arts program within the school, so there was a broader variety to how we practiced our knowledge. The arts program provided an outlet for students with different learning approaches and integrated more project-based learning. In English, as we read a Shakespeare play, we would create costume renderings for characters in the play, sure to convey their traits through the costumes they wore. In Biology, we were given the task of creating a short video of the process of mitosis. In Civics, we constructed different ‘hats’ that the president wore to learn his duties. These are just a few of the different ways that we learned through different styles and techniques. Through the variation of the learning that I did in high school, I was able to find the best way that I learned, which was project-based practicing.

As a teacher, it is very important to understand that there is a large variety of way that students learn, and it is essential to integrate multiple techniques into the classroom to benefit all students. Whether it be projects, worksheets, Socratic seminars, or visuals, it is vital for a student to feel as if they have some sort of stake in the classroom, and that includes learning the way that suits them best, creating an altogether more productive classroom community. Betsy Woods in her This I Believe essay “The Best Way to Learn is to Teach” reveals that teachers can learn a lot from their students, and that includes different techniques on how to learn.