The Modern-Day Pack Horse Woman

Hey Reader~

As I get to know my class and dive into the academic data, I forget what a process it is. Each year I feel like I’m starting over even though I’ve been doing this for over 10 years. Sure, there are research-based interventions and instructional resources that I use to adjust my instruction for students.

However, kids are not robots. Pulling in any evidenced-based practice is exactly what I should be doing. There've been some really good educational articles I’ve bookmarked to read and I’m finally sitting down to look over one of them. The one I read today is from a substack called “The Next Thirty Years, The Future of Education Reform.”

The Next 30 Years has a couple of goals and one is to reimagine education reform as a practice-driven enterprise—in which we should focus more on what happens between teachers and students in classrooms day to day. The article I read, Beyond Belief: Reframing Teaching as a Design Science, hits on this.

If you want to nerd out and read the articles like I did, let me know what you think. If you don’t, I’ll tell you what stood out to me:

The article suggests four steps towards a science-based profession. One step being to establish a shared core of professional knowledge, meaning there should be a shared understanding of learning, rooted in cognitive science and learning theory. In layman’s terms: professional development that is offered to teachers should be science with evidence. Teaching should be a science-based profession.

I agree with all of the points from the article, however, they never mentioned anything about the relationship that a student has with their teacher. Kids have feelings, they have frustrations, they have things they want to celebrate and things they want to cry about. I can do all the things that are right for that child’s brain to learn, but if that child doesn’t trust me as their teacher or believe in themselves, they’re not going to learn. How do I earn their trust? How do I make them see themselves as capable?

Did you have a teacher that impacted your self-esteem? Either negatively or positively, let me know how that worked out!