Focus Is On The Student, Not Me!

For this blogpost, I listened to episodes 164, 167, and 168 of Jeff Utecht's SOS Podcast.

It feels really easy to me as a teacher to focus on my own performance and student outcomes. What did I do well? What am I good at? What do I seem like I'm bad at? While asking these questions seem like they could make me a better teacher, I think they ultimately detract from my purpose in teaching. My purpose in teaching is to help students, consequently, I think the questions I ask myself should look a little different. Are the students understanding the material/content? Do they feel like they have value in my class? Am I growing their interest in learning? I think these types of questions can have much more impact on my ability to be an effective teacher. 

One way that I can implement this concept is to focus on the social and emotional learning (SEL) of students. Students thrive when they know we authentically care about their perspectives. This is important because I think it takes the focus a little bit away from strictly teaching content and more onto developing the student, yet it can be easy as a teacher to become engrossed in solely focusing on content delivery in class. 

The crux of this is that learning does not simply occur by being fed content. Rather, learning is a product of content, learner mindset, and relationship. Students must have a willingness to learn, and they should feel comfortable with who they are learning from and with. A large part of this is a willingness to make mistakes. Learning is often best facilitated by mistakes, so we rarely are able to learn when we are in constant fear of failure. As Jeff said in his podcast, "failure is what comes right before success." The trouble with this concept is that developing a willingness to make mistakes often comes from seeing a willingness to make mistakes by others. Consequently, I feel it is one of my most important duties as a teacher to openly admit my mistakes and address them whenever I can.