Educators value the success of all students. Educators care for students and act in their best interests.

  1. I ensure that I learn my students names as quick as possible, and refer to them by their preferred names whenever I interact with them.
  2. Some students may struggle with being in a typical class more than others. I find ways to engage them as best I can. For example there is an Indigenous boy in my practicum class, he has been in and out of school for most of his life and doesn’t cope well in a traditional classroom. Last week, we had a writing prompt for cinquain poetry that he didn’t want to engage in, instead I went to him, found a topic of interest to him and just talked to him about it. After we had chatted for a while, we co-composed a cinquain together about our chosen topic.
  3. I mediate interpersonal disputes between students in a way that allows them to feel valued, heard and allows them to collaborate on a solution together. An example I can think of happened last year in my first practicum, a grade 1 class at a catholic school. A student was passing a desk and bumped it, this caused an open water bottle to spill on the student in front of the desk. This situation involved three students, none of whom felt they were at fault, and the little girl who had water spilled on her was very upset. I took them aside, listened to each of their perspectives (and had they other two listen at the same time). After they had all shared, I asked them directive questions that allowed them to take control of their actions, and responsibility as a group. In the end they collaborated to clean up, decide on steps to avoid this in the future and make up with each other.
  4. I create and unique and personal motivations for students to work towards their goals. While I was working in Korea, I would motivate the students to improve their own personal spelling test scores by creating a drawing of their choice in their spelling book if they improved their score from the previous test the most. I ensured that I did this in such a way that every student was recognized at some point and achieved improvement.