My prior teaching experiences have led me to understand how important community within the classroom is to a good learning environment, being prepared always helps, and hard work usually pays off. This week I want to focus on my peer teaching experience and how it led to an enhanced learning community in our classroom.
Malea, Nikki, and I started our peer teaching journey prior to spring break. It was clear from the beginning that our team worked well together and desired to give as well as receive the most out of this opportunity. We spent the entirety of our break preparing for our individual and team-teaching responsibilities. I believe that we each felt heard, respected, and supported by one another during this process. We had become a community of three (really four with our teacher Claire’s constant help and guidance).
Spring break came and went, and it was finally time for us to teach. We had spent weeks preparing for this moment. As expected, we hit some speedbumps throughout day one. Students being quiet after a week off, technology taking a long time to boot up, and cold weather. Ultimately, our preparedness allowed us to be flexible when situations like these occurred. Day two was where we all felt something magical happened. Everyone had finished painting their rays, installed their mirrored mosaic pieces firmly onto the wall, and we started our individual reflections. These shared reflections brought greater understanding and compassion of each other’s human experience. This beautiful experience reinforced my previous teaching philosophy that the classroom is and should be a learning community.
For this week’s art piece, I focused on how our class transformed from simply being a group of individuals to something greater during the reflection portion of our peer teaching project. I started by adding fifteen bright orbs of light to represent each of the students in our class. At first glance, each orb appears to be floating on its own path like a celestial dandelion being blown by solar winds, spreading seeds of light throughout the cosmos. But if you take a moment, step back, and look at the orbs as a grouping, you might see a familiar connection between them. High above us in the Colorado night sky is the constellation of Draco. This constellation has sixteen stars (15 students and Claire) and when grouped together represents a dragon. To many people the dragon represents wisdom, strength and knowledge.
This peer teaching experience has inspired me to seek out new communities, learn new technologies, and explore art making techniques that I have previously been apprehensive to attempt. I would love to incorporate a peer teaching lesson of my own if I end up teaching high school photography or art. There is so much to be learned from this experience!
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