Olivia C Rix

Many people and experiences led me to wanting to become a teacher. One person who influenced me to be a teacher was my Nana. My Nana was a second grade teacher and absolutely my favorite person in the world before she passed in 2005. She always read books to me and told be about her students and I loved it. My family was also very open and encouraging of me to become a teacher, which I know it isn't always the case. As a teacher we have to receive a lot of education and license but don’t get paid very well for the quite hard and time consuming. For a lot of parents they want their children to become successful and rich which usually isn't the case of teachers. But my parents were very encouraging of me to become a teacher or frankly to do whatever I wanted. Also the women in my cohort at college have truly inspired be to be the teacher I want to be.

But the thing that really drove me to wanting to become a teacher was my experience in work with children.  I started babysitting in grade school and continued up through highschool, and now I’m part of a babysitting agency. After getting into babysitting, I started to work at an art summer camp as a junior camp counselor for two years. And then moved to a preschool summer camp as a camp counselor in highschool. I loved that me working and getting paid was to play with and get to know amazing children. My summer job in highschool was to literally read stories, play games, sing silly songs, get to know and play with children, and I absolutely loved it! I wanted to be able to do this all year around. I originally was going to go to college for fine arts but decided to go for early childhood education, as I thought I can always make art and don’t need a degree for it, plus I could introduce young children to arts. So coming to a school where we were taught Reggio Emilia as a dream come true as it combines education with art.

 

My favorite and what I’ve felt to be the most informative and what molded me to the teacher I am were my classes the last two years while at school. These were the classes I took my doing my practicum and student teaching experience. Interdisciplinary Learning Through the Art taught me that my passion for art can be used to teach actual lesson in a classroom. That students can be active and creative while still learning new things. My Observations, Assessments, and Documentation class taught me about all the different assessments that their are both formal and informal. It also taught me how my much fun documentation could be, in fact documenting student’s learning and work has become on of my favorite things. I made a documentation book at my preschool practicum that was filled with the students self portraits, portraits of their friends and dications of what friendship means to them. I ended up giving the book to my preschool mentor teacher and the classroom and the students absolutely love looking at, even till this day as I was informed my my preschool mentor teacher, which was so great to hear. My Lifespan and Language Development classes taught me so much about children and their growth. They informed me a lot about how children not only grow but how they learn, and what children need to learn and grow. Along with my classes I feel that I have learned a lot from my practicum and student teaching experience and the mentor teachers I got to learn from and work with. And honestly I think that is the best way to learn about to be a great teacher, is through hands on experience, guidance, and observing a teacher at work with the students and their interactions.  I have also learned so much from the women in my cohort, their teaching styles and sharing all our experiences together was a great learning and growing experience.

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All this knowledge that I’ve gained from my education classes, the people in them, and my mentor teachers will definitely help be the best teacher I can be. Through learning about the Reggio Approach and visiting the town where it came from  really opened my eyes to how school can be. How school doesn’t have to be students sitting in desks filling out worksheets while a teacher lectures to them all day. It can be students exploring the things around them and experimenting. It can be students singing, dancing, moving, and doing artful things. Because when students are actively engaged in whatever it is that they are doing they are learning and using their their minds, thinking. The knowledge and skills I have learned from being apart of a classroom, working with a seasoned teacher is will always be with me. And I’m always to going look back on those times working with such great teachers and asking myself what would they do in the situation I’m in. It was working with these teachers as well as working with the members of my cohort that I learned how important collaboration is and how much I love working with educators, artists, and children; it’s important to collaborate with your students. Collaboration allows for all growth and learning, when I am collaborating with others I too am learning and trying something new. And I want my students to collaborate with both me and their peers so they we can all grow and learn new things, instead of my just teaching; I know they have a lot that they can teach me and others.

 

I will use what I have learned from all these experiences to become an effective and great teacher in many ways. One way by still communicating with the members of my cohort. Having them is a great resource to bounce ideas and problems off of. Plus we’ve all become great friends and we will always be there for each other. Another way is me always being open to learning new things, going to professional developments, and collaborating with teachers and artists as much as I can. Even though I am a teacher I am still and will always be a learner.

As a teacher no matter what I alway will think about the students and children first and what is best for them versus grades. I want the students in my classroom to get to me children and experience all the fun things that their creativity and imagination can offer. I will always include art and activity experiences in my classroom.

I always want students/children to be able to talk with each other and able to grow and explore relationships in my classroom. I will never have a silent classroom with students always just completing worksheets. My classroom will be filled with great conversations and activity because children do learn from each other and are the one of best tools to help each other learn. As a strong believer and lover of collaboration having the students collaborate with me and their peers is very important.

When setting up my classroom environment I will definitely look back on how beautifully and child inspired it was in Reggio Emilia. I will look back on the miniature classrooms that we built in class. And I will think about what I think will work best for the students in my classroom.

 

My classroom environment I hope will be a very open and welcoming place for all students, children, and families. I will do this by collaboration with my students and building the classroom together, not only the layout but also the classroom expectations and such. I want students to know they everything they do shows their growth and learning. I will do with by documentation, such as boards around the classroom and in the hallways as well as perhaps through a portfolio for each student. I’d like for the portfolios to be available for the families to look at daily and see what their child is doing day by day or more reasonably week by week. I want the families to feel welcome into the classroom, having them be able to come in and share something either about their family like a tradition or their culture or it could be something as simple as what they do together on the weekend or read their favorite family book to the class. This will help creative a great community and really help me as well as the other students to get to know each other. As well as that I would also do daily short shares everyday where a couple of students are able to share something and then answer a couple of questions from their peers. I want the children in my classroom to feel comfortable and be able to talk about anything they want.