Find out how you can transform your classrooms and the world outside by thinking and acting like a leader!
Every educator’s versatile skill-set keeps expanding as and when challenges arise. In addition, every educator is constantly setting an example by being the role model of values they want their students to imbibe. For instance, quickly adapting to remote teaching to ensure uninterrupted student learning during COVID! Your rapidly changing classrooms require you to take on the role of a leader. In fact, this may well be an opportunity of a lifetime to grow as an individual and contribute to your community!
Let’s begin with this reflection above: Think about that one lesson, one question that challenged you in the classroom, that opportunity to teach our students something beyond the lines of their textbooks! But also, think about what stops you: who is making the decisions that impact your classrooms? Are you making the decisions? If not, are the decision-makers truly equipped to understand the current classroom needs? And if so, are they open to changing what students learn and how they learn?
We are all educational influencers!
We learn, adapt and grow together to navigate never-seen-before territories. We accept feedback and constantly reflect on our weaknesses. Most importantly, we are also responsible to help our learners challenge their belief systems as they grow and expose themselves to the world!
School leaders, take note: Understanding the importance and respecting the challenges your faculty is facing is something school leaders must practice in order to have a healthier understanding of what is working in the classrooms and what is not.
Curriculum is your tool, not your master!
With everything evolving so rapidly around us, the leaders and decision-makers must sit down to have an open conversation about discarding old education systems and strategies to pave the way for collaborative and connected learning. How we teach is crucial to us becoming leaders and making our students envision us as one! This is where we bring ourselves in our classrooms: one, build trust and believe that you can be vulnerable with your students; two, engage beyond the curriculum with what’s happening around them, and help them strengthen concepts.
Here’s a set of posters to support you with the HOW of conceptual learning.
Do YOU envision yourself as a leader?
Let’s take a moment to go back to old times and reflect on WHY of becoming a teacher? Are you there, yet?
As good leaders often do, we have and should continue to recalibrate our practices to become changemakers in the 3Ps of leadership, personal, peer and professional.
With our colleagues and peers at and beyond school, engage in a ‘critical friends practice’ to critique and expand the horizons of classroom instruction. Join a larger professional community to broaden our perspectives of impactful teaching! Find your teacher tribes on different mediums and engage with purposeful dialogue.
Lastly, our level of self-awareness, confidence, and commitment to improve is what truly sets us apart as a leader! Increasingly, an important marker of our leadership capacities is our adoption of technology. Using platforms like Toddle that support collaboration amongst teaching teams, allow robust feedback and assessment approaches to be integrated, and promote student agency are also reflective of strong leadership.
Everyday, our learners are being exposed to harsh realities of the world through news channels, social mediums, family groups, etc. We teach them the curriculum so they can grow and strive to make sense of this world. The question to ask ourselves is: are we there for our students as impartial leaders?
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