For the first of these, boundaries with students, I feel that I have grown a lot in this area since the beginning of my professional career and am still learning how to properly develop them. I have learned to see the importance of boundary maintenance not only for “professionalism”, which was never a very convincing argument for me, but also for holding a trauma-informed space. It’s important that students have trauma-informed boundaries with adults, not only for their present safety, but also so they have a model with which they can compare and hold as a standard for other relationships with any adults in their lives. So, while I have learned this as a foundation, I still struggle a bit with bringing this abstract idea into practical use, especially in my subject area of health, where things like bodies, sexuality, and identities are discussed. I would like to be able to contribute my own experiences to discussion in order to provide personal examples of the topics and to potentially destigmatize the topics. But I also don’t want to share too much to where the students feel uncomfortable or that they have a closer, more personal relationship with me than is appropriate. This will likely be something that I will have to research more on my own and air on the side of caution until I am able to find the right balance. 

For the second topic, which is the enforcement of set standards, curriculum, and rules by the school, district, state and nation, I suppose I will have to have some conversations with my teacher and some other health teachers and administrators in order to get a real feel for the direction of this. I haven’t learned too much about this general topic, but it seems to me that this depends very widely on the area and specific school and the culture of them. 

While building intent and community is a strong focus of my management philosophy, a more pressing issue is engagement. Technology has been a fantastic tool to boost engagement in the virtual classroom, but it feels a bit like a bandaid on a sharkbite. I do not have a brilliant idea for solving this issue, however I believe we can take moments and lessons from these times to improve student engagement in the future. Student’s have reacted positively to the use of Digital Audio Workshops to create music with each other. This technology, while limited and not as engaging in the long run, gives students another degree of creativity and autonomy with their music. I believe that giving students the knowledge and space to explore music, partnered with a sense of community and belonging will boost engagement and musical output.

As we discussed in this class “the student is not the problem, the problem is the problem.” If we approached dangerous or harmful behaviors through a supportive and restorative model it turns these inevitable situations into learning opportunities, and allows our students to feel empowered to take risks and be responsible members of a school that values them. If the school models responsible risk taking in our curriculum and culture through boundless inquiry, I believe students will see the same ideal reflected in a restorative discipline approach. They can then feel supported to not only take risks in the classroom but also to grow from past mistakes. 

The last attribute I mentioned is personal challenge. Challenges can either motivate students or cause them to disengage all together, and every student is different. While we cannot personalize every curriculum, we can give personal challenges to our students; challenges that are evocative to them personally, involve what they are interested in, and reward their actions when they rise to the challenge. We have studied how a student centered curriculum  impacts student engagement and we can all remember checking out when subjects seemed like we would never use them. Connecting with students on things that are pertinent to them, while giving them the opportunity to succeed, could help reach both motivated and disengaged students in the same classroom.

My philosophy is influenced by my own experiences growing up. In the classroom I was present and engaged but I was a disengaged student at home. It also comes from 15 years of teaching and coaching, which while helpful, were in voluntary environments where students/players chose to be there. This is very different from school. From our class I have been reminded that not everyone sees school or learning the same way as me, and that for many it is not a safe or welcoming environment. As I mentioned in my mid-philosophy statement, I want to design my classroom as a space for students to have as their own safe haven from whatever it is that might be plaguing them outside of school, or even in other classes. After discussing cultural sensitivity and a checking of our own biases, I realized that in designing my space I need to put my own taste for bold colors and line to the wayside in my classroom, and think more of the space as a blank canvas for my students to show themselves. I had the complete opposite idea about my room before taking this class, but now I see student-centered teaching going beyond the subjects and into the way we design everything. 

Something I have always been passionate about is equality and social justice, and I have learned a TON in this class and Anita’s and Molly’s about accessibility and equitable teaching practices. I want to combat my own cis-white-middle-class programming and not pass on toxic behaviors to the kids, and I think the best way to do that is to be humble, to listen and trustvprimary sources about their experiences, and to remind myself that learning is a two-way process. We learn from our students as much as they learn from us, if we can listen to what they tell us that is. A big aspect of this is checking our personal feelings in times of conflict and trying to bring trauma informed practices to our teaching and discipline, and not make assumptions about the character of our students.. The resources I have from this class should help me to become better at being there for my students, and to remember that every student has the capacity to learn. 

In my student teaching placement, students have began to express a higher level of stress as we move towards the holidays and the end of the term. Unfortunately a few students have approached my CTs and I with the possibility of dropping Band due to heavy coursework in other classes. While this is unfortunate, it has given me the opportunity to have very real discussions with students about managing stress, and facing the reality of covid. For the most part, these discussions have helped to retain students who feel like dropping. During these discussions I try to appeal to the emotional side, as a student myself it is too easy to view our current educational system as pointless. 

I am excited to exit this stage in our lives and begin working to build a community of mindful students. I am also glad that this class has left us with a plethora of ethical resources for for navigating classroom management.