What's Next:
Growing My Abilities to Support Diverse Learners
For my entire professional life, I have had the joy of working with, supporting, and learning with a diverse group of high school students and their families in a college access program. My love for this work and my dedication to constant growth as an educator is what drove me to pursue graduate studies in Education. Through these studies, I have learned how to think, plan, and facilitate in ways that more deeply engage a diverse group of students and supports their academic performance, their personal growth, and their motivation. As I move forward, I remain focused on becoming increasingly effective at supporting diverse groups of learners. I plan to extend my learning in directions that will help me better support the multicultural group of students in my program, support younger students’ preparation for academic success in high school and beyond, and support the development of my team of staff.
In order to continue my growth as an educator and ally for the diverse high school students that I work with, I will continue to expand my knowledge of culturally sustaining pedagogy and practices that both affirm students’ identities and provide academic challenge and support. I am aware that implicit biases impact even the most well-meaning educators, so I am committed to constant self-reflection and deepening my self-awareness. Also, I know that inequity in education is systemic, and I am eager to learn more about policies and systems that support educational equity. To continue my learning in these ways, I plan to use resources from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This website provides a myriad of free resources that include news and research, reading lists, webinars, self-reflection tools, and practical lesson plans and strategies. Also, I know that family engagement supports student success, so I want to improve my ability to build relationships with more students’ families by beginning to learn Spanish. While my students come from a wide variety of language backgrounds, learning Spanish would enable me to have more direct communication with the largest number of additional families. I plan to use Duolingo, a free app, to begin this work, and I intend to seek out additional resources and opportunities to practice the language with other speakers as I progress.
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While I want the work we do with our diverse high school students to be as impactful as possible, I also acknowledge that students’ experiences before high school are formative and influence their trajectory in high school and beyond. The beliefs that they hold about themselves, their abilities, and their future can impact their performance in their classes and their likelihood to take advantage of opportunities like the college access program with which I work. Over the past few years, I have begun working more closely with middle school students in our area, hoping to add to the great work their school is doing to help students to develop positive mindsets about school and learning. To strengthen this work, I want to improve my ability to design learning and leadership experiences that are developmentally appropriate and engaging for middle school students. I plan to utilize resources from Leadership Logistics, which includes a collection of lessons, activities, and ideas designed to support leadership development in young people. I also plan to explore a series of articles about student engagement from Edutopia, and to make time after each session to reflect on when and why the students were engaged or disengaged.
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I also want to improve understanding of how to support adult learning—specifically, how to best support the team of staff that I supervise. Creating effective trainings, providing helpful support and feedback, and connecting staff with opportunities for meaningful professional development are responsibilities that I take seriously, because I owe it to my team and the students. I want to robustly support staff’s learning so that they are best equipped to support the students’ learning. To enhance my work with my staff, I want to gain an understanding of adult learning theories and consider how those theories could inform my approach to supporting my team. I plan to read Learning in Adulthood: A Comprehensive Guide by Sharan Merriam and Rosemary S. Caffarella, a book that provides the academic and theoretical background that I seek.
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As a lifelong learner, I am eager to continue to continue my personal and professional growth. As an educator who cares deeply about my students and team, I am committed to focusing on learning goals that will make me a more effective supporter of the diverse learners I work with. I am certain that in pursuit of these goals, I will learn equally from academic resources, from experience, from peers, and from students and families.
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Schuler Scholars in a writing program
(Photo courtesy of Schuler Scholar Program)
Celebrating college decisions with staff
(Photo courtesy of Schuler Scholar Program)