Questions I ask myself: Self Reflection

“As a teacher, I possess tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous.  I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration.   I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.  In all situations it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated, a child humanized or de-humanized.”  - Hiam Ginott

Self  reflection is a part of who I am, or better yet, who I have become.  I am always asking myself about the choices I make, or made and why I chose that.  Did I make the most informed decision that I could make? What prompted my motivation? 

Particularly in my work with young children do I utililize the powers of self  reflection.  I guess it is a professional tool, were my choices of lesson plans successful for everyone? Did I teach it in a manner for all to understand? Was I/am I patient with the children that require more guidance. 

It isn’t the work the children are doing that requires me to pause and think, it is the social/emotional interaction – my connection with them.  Did I hear/understand correctly what was being said? I know this sounds silly. But learning takes place on so many levels.

 It isn’t about learning to mix paint, or clay techniques, it’s how the child can interpret these learnings to express their ideas about the world and themselves.

When the lesson is challenging for a child, for example drawing a representation of a fish or musical instrument, guiding them through the process, without doing it for them.  I call it helping he or she get “to the otherside” (through the part that is challenging), to where the child feels confident about his or her ability to continue a representation and like it.  I have seen children use erasers a lot (a whole other blog entry).  

I feel like I straddle that fence of how much information do I give, how much visual do I show children in order to get them to do their own interpretation of a work. 

So I self reflect on my teaching style.  And if I feel I haven’t been successful for all the children in my group I change the lesson plan.  Even one child not being successful will make me change the plan. 

When I reflect on my self and my work, my goal is to help me be better at what I do, at least more mindful.  It doesn’t make it easier to work like this, it can be harder: to slow down and figure out how to support a child’s development and learning.

I filter the experiences I have with children through my own experiences.  And my upbringing while some aspects of it were delightful, others were horrendous.  Consciously or unconsciously we filter our lives through the lenses of our own experiences. 

So I choose to try to be as aware and mindful of the way I interact with children and adults.  I had teachers that didn’t really like me: I don’t know if it was my skin color or the way I acted.  I had a few teachers that I knew really wanted to help me learn and grow.  One of those was a math teacher in high school.  She was the only teacher that I did well in math with.  She also wore really pretty dresses. 

As a teacher, I am aware that I am responsible for the children when they are in my care, but that their parents are wholly responsible for them.  As a parent I realize that I am wholly responsible for my children and teachers support their growth and development when they are in their care.

When ever there were issues with my son’s in school, I looked at the whole picture of where they were developmentally, emotionally, what was and wasn’t happening in our family and what my gut feeling was about the situation.

watercolor on watercolor paper
summer 2011

I reflect on my parenting style.  Especially because I didn’t have good role models and I re-invented myself once I became a parent.  Becoming a teacher helped me immensely.  The requirements to understand early childhood development and psychology really supported the opening of my brain to grow and for me to begin to heal the wounds of my childhood and adolescence. 

I witnessed brutality in my childhood home, I strongly and very clearly knew that that kind of behavior would not be tolerated at all in my home. 

Mindfulness in my actions sometimes means I am in slow motion.  I look through what I see, feel and how I interpret what is happening around me: not that I can’t go faster, I do, but self reflection is a way of being that I can’t change about myself .