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I believe that being a teacher-activist is choosing to fight for what is right and bring social injustices into the classroom so that your students are aware of what is happening in their community. Teacher-activists are not afraid to call out racism or sexism and educate themselves and their students on how these issues can be combated.

I went to Red for Ed last week and think that that was an excellent example of being a teacher-activist. I wanted my future students to see me as a positive example of someone who teaches activism but also does it in their own life. I went to the rally to advocate for more funding for public schools and less of an emphasis on standardized tests and state assessments. I was proud to go and show my support for education and hoped that my future students would see me as a positive example.

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I believe that collaboration is necessary if one wants to be a good educator. Having another perspective is extremely beneficial as there is not one singular way to do something or teach material. Every student has different learning styles and every teacher has varying teaching styles.

In my Classroom Management class that I took last year, we had an entire unit on collaboration. We talked about the importance of asking for help and being open to new suggestions and ideas.

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I believe community/family is not necessarily defined by those who are related to you by blood, but those who make you feel at home. A classroom should be a second "family" for a student-one where they feel supported and validated. A community rises up to support everyone who is a part of it and can become a family for those who don't have a strong support system at home.

I also believe that a community has a responsibility to rise up and overcome obstacles and hardships together. A problem is much easier to face when with a group than alone.

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I believe my students will learn best when I make equity a priority in my classroom. I want all of my students' educational needs to be met and meeting my students at their level is the best way to help my students learn. Since every child learns differently and at a different pace, giving every child the same resources and tools is not the way that they are going to reach academic success.

Since my additional license is in special education, equity is a large focus of mine as a future educator.

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I believe that students learn best when they feel comfortable in their learning environment. Students are not going to speak out in class and ask questions if they don't feel respected by their peers or their teacher. It is important to create a classroom founded on respecting cultural differences so that all students want to reach academic success.

Another way that students learn best is when teachers provide differentiated instruction and cater to their individual educational needs. A student who is a kinesthetic learner will not be engaged in a classroom that only provides instruction with paper and pencil (or lectures). The link below goes into greater detail about differentiated instruction.

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The 12 Best Differentiated Instruction Strategies for CTE

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Meeting the needs of your diverse CTE students is tough. Learn about the 12 best differentiated instruction strategies to help your students succeed!

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I believe all my future students are capable of academic success. It is my role as a future educator to provide all of my students with the resources and tools they need to be the best student possible.

I also believe that all my future students have individual learning styles that must be catered to and considered when creating lesson plans. No two children are the same or learn the same, so it is important to keep in mine the differences between every student. This is why differentiation is so important in lesson planning-you want to cater to every students' learning needs.

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I believe my responsibilities as a teacher are to help my students examine societal structures and develop a curiosity about the world. James Baldwin writes that the purpose of education is "...to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself " (Baldwin 678). l want my students to feel comfortable discussing the "touchier" subjects and I want to create an environment where we can deconstruct societal norms and students can learn to advocate for themselves.

The video below shows Dr. Dorinda Carter Andrews discussing gaps in critical consciousness and how this prevents us from providing equitable education.

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The consciousness gap in education - an equity imperative | Dorinda Carter Andrews | TEDxLansingED

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I believe the purpose of schooling is to create a generation of people who try and make society better. We want schools to educate students politically, socially, and economically so that they strive to better themselves and the people around them. However, I feel like schools don't necessarily make this a priority and instead focus on drilling information into students' heads.

Schooling should equip students with the necessary skills to be successful as an adult, whether this means learning social skills or a natural curiosity for the world. This could also mean learning about political and social issues in our society and how they can be fixed. I've attached a link below that explains the importance of teaching being used to help people become better human beings.

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I believe that teaching is for both the student and the educator. It is the teacher's role to educate their students but the teacher can also learn from the student. I have noticed personally that the things I have learned while working with children directly are far more valuable than anything a textbook could have taught me.

I also believe that teaching is constantly changing. New theories, ideas, practices, and concepts are created every day-which means educators must be on their toes and constantly seeking new information. Being able to engage your students is crucial to being a good educator.

The article below lists fifteen different examples of how teaching is evolving and changing, especially over time.

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Updating Your Pedagogy: 15 Challenges For The 21st Century Teacher
by Terry Heick
ed note: This post has been updated and republished from a 2015 article
It's tempting to say that no matter how much technology pushes on education, every teacher will always need to know iconic teacher practices like assessment, curriculum design, classroom management, and cognitive coaching.

This may end up being true-how education changes in the next 20 years is a choice rather than the inevitable tidal wave of social and technological change it's easy to sit back and wait for. Think of the very limited change in education since 2000 compared to the automotive industry, computer industry, retail consumer industry, etc. Huge leaps forward are not a foregone conclusion.

But it's probably going to be a bit different than that. There are certain areas where significant change is more probably than others. It doesn't seem likely that eLearning-as we now understand and use the term-will replace schools and teachers. Online courses are inferior to in-person teaching in too many important ways to completely supplant teachers and schools. (Blended learning is more likely to be the norm in the next decade.)

We've written before about the kinds of "things" modern teachers must be able to do. Below are 15 tasks that are less skill-based-and some a bit more conceptual, collectively representing how teaching is changing.

Teaching is no longer about classroom management, testing, and content delivery.
How Teaching Is Changing: 15 New Realities Every Educator Faces 1. Personalization
The Old: Administer assessment, evaluate performance, report performance, then-maybe-make crude adjustments the best you can

The New: Identifying, prioritizing, and evaluating data for each student individually-in real time

The Difference: Precision

Or rather, determine the kind of data is most important for each student, figure out a way to consistently obtain that kind of data, and then either analyze it personally, or monitor the algorithms that are doing it for you.

This is not unlike an automotive mechanic moving carburetors to fuel-injection systems (that are no themselves becoming outdated) in the 1980s and 1990s. The former was crude, requiring frequent corrections and "tune-ups" done by hand; the latter was far more precise, and required new skills on the part of the mechanic. Rather than making mechanical adjustments, mechanics became system managers. That is, they spent more time adjusting the systems-sensors, ECUs, etc-that themselves were making the adjustments.
2. Data forms
The Old: Numbers, letters, and maybe a bar graph or pie chart

The New: Making data that's beautiful. (Or at least visual.)

The Difference: Meaning & accessibility
Summary
More and more, teachers have to design data sources and visualizations-usable data applied meaningfully. The days of taking a test and waiting for results have been gone for years. Soon it will be time to put behind us the process of even instant data results unless that data is packaged in a way that promotes seamless revision of curriculum, assessment, and instruction.

Or pushed further, which content a student encounters, when; which community they connect with, when; which level of "cognitive intensity" they reach, when. Take the following data visualization for example.

"In this example, Deb Roy's team captures every time his son ever heard the word water along with the the context he saw it in. They then used this data to penetrate through the video, find every activity trace that co-occurred with an instance of water and map it on a blueprint of the apartment. That's how they came up with wordscapes: the landscape that data leaves in its wake."

Incredible, no? Tomorrow's teachers will then need to make important decisions about the kinds of metrics taken (see above), and the way it is visualized so that important patterns, trends, and possibilities are highlighted.
3. Classroom management
The Old: Minimize negative interactions (fighting, bullying, etc.) and promoting compliance with rules and "expectations"

The New: Analyze and coordinate student social interactions

The Difference: Scale
Summary
This could mean physical communities or digital. Teachers need to mobilize students, whether within classrooms, schools, and on campuses, or within local communities in a place-based learning or project-based learning scenario. Teaching digital citizenship, connectivity, and possibility will be more important than teaching content.

This is a reality faced today, not tomorrow.
4. Teaching
The Old: Delivering content shaped for universal consumption

The New: Modeling affection and curiosity

The Difference: Truly valuing how students think
Summary
Today's teacher has to demonstrate for students not how to solve problems, but why those problems should be solved. It will be less about creating a PBL unit where students clean up a local creek or park, but rather teaching the students how to identify and work through those needs themselves. This is the human element of affection-honoring the things and spaces around you as a way of living.

The same goes for curiosity-thinking-aloud through a self-reflection. Challenging student assumptions through digital commenting or face-to-face interactions-and connecting them with communities that can do the same.
5. Content
The Old: Initially it was teaching "a class," and then it became a list of standards

The New: Reconcile hundreds of academic standards-standards that include technology, citizenship, literacy, etc. This goes way beyond "content areas."

The Difference: Integration
Summary
Which means not just knowing the standard, planning for its mastery, and then "teaching" it, but reconciling discrepancies "horizontally" within and across content areas, and then "vertically" across grade levels as well. And further, it's no longer just about your class or content area, but also standards from a dozen other organizations that all chime in with well-intentioned but ultimately unsustainable to-do lists.
6. Lesson planning The Old: Manage grouping, finishing classwork, and creating a "system" for homework
The New: Personalizing workflows based on constantly changing circumstance (data, need to know, student interest, changes in community, etc.) using flipped classrooms, digital distribution, and even self-directed learning

The Difference: Authenticity
Summary
Given local context and circumstance-technology, bandwidth, social opportunities and challenges, etc-what kind of workflow is most efficient for this student?

Does it make sense to embed every student in every local community? Does it make more sense here, and less sense there?

Given local literacy habits and access, is it better to spend more time gathering sources, evaluating sources, or sharing sources? What kind of adjustments should we make based on what we know about the world the students are growing up in?

Does in-person mentoring make sense, or given topics of study-agriculture, robotics, literature, music, etc.-do digital spaces make more sense?

For this student, right here, right now, what exactly do they need?
7. Your students
The Old: Receiving a class roster

The New: Knowing a student's history, place, and potential

The Difference: Becoming a more human process
Summary
Which brings us to #6 (which really is kind of the point of it all)-taking all of the mechanical and gadget-borne stuff above, and making it "whole" for the person standing in front of you. This is not new, but the complexity of making this possible on a daily basis is.
Other New Realities The Modern Teacher Faces
8. Designing learning experiences that carry over seamlessly between home and school. So, making "school" disappear and even giving the illusion that you're working yourself out of a job.

9. Troubleshooting technology, including cloud-based issues, log-in info, etc.

10. Verifying student privacy/visibility across scores of monitored and unmonitored social interactions per week; Validate legal issues, copyright information, etc.

11. Refining driving questions and other matters of inquiry on an individual student basis

12. Insisting on quality-of performance, writing, effort, etc.-when the planning, technology, and self-reflection fail

13. Evaluating the effectiveness of learning technology (hardware, software, and implementation of each)

14. Filtering apps based on operating system, cost, complexity, performance, audience, and purpose

15. Clarifying and celebrating learning, understanding, mistakes, progress, creativity, innovation, purpose, and other abstractions of teaching and learning on a moment by moment basis
How Teaching Is Changing: 15 New Realities Every Educator Faces; image attribution flickr user nasagoddard

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How Teaching Is Changing: 15 Challenges For The 21st Century Teacher

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Updating Your Pedagogy: 15 Challenges For The 21st Century Teacher by Terry Heick ed note: This post has been updated and republished from a 2015 article It's tempting to say that no matter how much technology pushes on education, every teacher will always need to know iconic teacher practices like assessment, curriculum design, classroom management, and cognitive coaching.

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I believe that learning should be guided and fostered. There is a difference between guiding a student towards knowledge and dropping the answer in their lap. Students are capable of much more than we give them credit for-all we have to do is create a solid foundation for them to build off of.

I also believe that learning should be accessible to all students and should be made equitable, not equal. Equitable learning is where every student is given the resources and tools to reach academic success-instead of every student being given equal resources and tools (equal learning). The article below explains what equity in learning is and why it is so important as a future educator.