What is the best advice you've ever received as an educator?
The best advice I ever received as an educators was to be fair, firm, and consistent within the teaching environment. Following this philosophy has certainly facilitated consistency in maintaining instructional best practices and personal professional development, fairness in providing an equitable and inclusive learning environment for all students, and firmness in ensuring rigor within my teaching and assessment processes.
What surprised you most about your career in education?
The thing that has surprised me the most in my 20+ years as an educator has been how the positionality of the profession has become the focus of so many broader social and political narratives, which, ultimately has led to both positive and negative changes within and external to the classroom. On the positive side, such dialogues have enabled teachers to have greater flexibility in terms of creating malleable learning spaces which, ultimately, accommodates for diverse learning styles much of which has been facilitated through access to existing and emerging technologies. Our recent teaching corps is also becoming much more culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse to be more reflective of and responsive to the needs of our increasingly majority-minority student populations. On the negative side, teaching, in many ways, has become a political battle ground of sorts with activist groups, legislators, and the like using teachers, classrooms, and students to advance one agenda or another. Unfortunately, this has led to the continued devaluation of teaching and the teaching profession which shows no signs of slowing within the near future.
What are your dreams for the future of education?
My dream for the future of education is for teaching to again be valued as a profession of first choice (and not of "last resort") and for teachers to be validated and rewarded in choosing education as their career.
Finish this sentence...If i wasn't......., I'd be.....
If I wasn't teaching, I would become a super volunteer working with some of my favorite community organizations.
