Embrace both positive and negative experiences. Why? It creates greatness. |
Embrace both positive and negative experiences. Why? It creates greatness. |
RECOGNIZING STUDENT FEAR -
It's the elephant in the classroom. Understanding fear, its causes, and its impact on students is important to me as an educator. To help students manage and overcome fear, I acknowledge I must research, study, and reflect on my experiences as both an online and campus college level instructor. Hearing what they aren't saying is an imperative skill for me to develop to recognize performance-based anxiety, fear of failure, fear of being laughed at, and even cultural components that impact learning. By recognizing cognitive, emotional, and physical reactions (such as memory deficits and even short-circuits of the central nervous system) I can work to create a nurturing environment to counteract these obstacles to learning. SAFE ZONE LEARNING STRATEGIES
|
|
WHAT'S EASY TO ME MIGHT NOT BE TO THEM -
Technical challenges in 21st century learning As an online teacher, I've experienced a new issue that "old school" instructors did not face. Learning now has the opportunity to take place in every corner of the world due to digital access to instructors and content. I must consider each student comes to the learning table with a unique level of technical experience, access, and equipment. I also have to recognize that what seems easy to me due to my digital experience, may be a first encounter for my learners. RECOGNIZING STRENGTHS & WEAKNESSES -
Some weaknesses should be accepted. What? Are you kidding me? Actually no. That doesn’t mean I shouldn't care about them, and it doesn’t mean I'm going to stop trying to overcome them. Acknowledging them in myself and in my students, I can be more productive and find work-arounds rather than getting bogged down in the fight. Empowering both instructor and student strengths won't make our weaknesses disappear, but it can help compensate for them by flourishing strengths to cover for them. As a teacher, I try to recognize and stop doing what doesn’t work, and do more of what does. Doing more of what works means there’s less time for what doesn’t, and building strengths is way more uplifting than fixing problems! MY STRENGTHS CREATE POSITIVE STUDENT EXPERIENCES
|