Expected, Inspected, & Respected.
"We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience."
-John Dewey |
"We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience."
-John Dewey |
During my 13 years as an educational assistant, there were times when I felt the teacher was doing a poor job of managing behaviour in the classroom or presenting material. I would never share these thoughts with the teachers I worked with because my job wasn't to be critical of them, it was to support them and the students as best I could. I came across this quote while reading Teach Like a Pirate: It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. -Theodore Roosevelt Having had the opportunity to lead lessons of my own, I now realize how difficult it can be at the front of the class. I'm glad I was never openly critical of my teacher colleagues because, without having been there myself, I really had no idea of the effort that goes into planning and assessing, or the subtle skills that must be artfully employed to make a lesson run smoothly. I have experienced frustration at lessons that didn't go the way I planned and I've found myself yelling over a noisy, off-task classroom. But I've also led lessons that went better than expected and felt the satisfaction of that success. Either way, I'm happy that I have shed my timidity and stepped into the arena.
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David Wiebe
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