EDU+583+Essential+Belief+Statement

Amity Beane EDU 583 Dr. Grace Ward Essential Belief Statement

Teaching, as a vocation, took time for me to embrace. I started working after college as a graphic designer for a large organization that also had a private school under its umbrella. After about 7 months of designing publications, my boss asked me if I would be interested in substituting for the art teacher, who was going on maternity leave. It was May, school was soon over. I agreed.

For six weeks I taught art in a room that held two bathrooms, a kitchen, and a hallway to a different section of the building. I was also told the day I started that the art teacher had taught one section of math. Math has never been my favorite subject but I was game to try.

After the six weeks was up, I was invited to interview for a full-time position. The organization had just received a large sum of money to start a Spanish program. Would I be willing to teach Spanish as well as art to grades k-10? In my interview I assured my boss that I enjoyed teaching but was not sure if it was the right career for me. My father, mother, grandparents, and various aunts and uncles were all teachers. It was the family business that I was not sure I wanted a piece of. My boss agreed that after a year we would take inventory of the situation and decide at that point whether or not to continue my contract.

So I became a teacher. That first year was very hard. I was teaching 3 kindergartens, 3 first grades, 3 second grades, 2 third grades, 2 fourth grades, and one grade each of 5-10th. I was teaching two subjects that were very different. I had not been trained as a teacher; I was an artist, a writer, a farmer, and a poet. After one year, my boss asked me about teaching. I told him that if I could try just teaching one subject at a time, that would be easier. He asked me to choose: Spanish or art. I chose Spanish because I was tired of the clean-up involved with teaching art.

And so I became a Spanish teacher! My second year was much better, and I was able to develop a curriculum for pre-k through 10th grades in Spanish that met the state learning results.

Over the years (this marks my 9th year) my teaching style has evolved to become collaborative, open, and exploratory. My curriculum is set by the state but I am able to be very creative with planning the learning time for students. I dislike straight rows of desks and prefer to have circles of chairs. Sometimes I take all the chairs out and let students sprawl on the floor to work. Group work is very important in my subject area because I am teaching communication and in order to learn Spanish, one has to 1. have something to say and 2. have someone to say it to (audience!). My teaching is very student-centered because the basic rules of Spanish can be learned in context. A few years ago, I decided to not use a textbook, because I found the pacing and scope and sequence ill-suited for my population of kids in Northern Washington County. After quitting the book, my planning time increased but my lessons also became much more interactive, student-centered, and inquiry based.

As an educator I have taken various leadership roles through the years. As a brand new teacher I took on the school yearbook and in five years won two awards for the work my students produced: one was a technology integration award and the other was a Showcase School award. The yearbook that year was produced in quantity and shipped to schools all over the state as an exemplar.

Another leadership role I assumed in the early years was Faith-In-Action adviser for my first school. This community-service component required that I oversee and approve all service. Ultimately I decided to take a group of students to the Dominican Republic for a service trip in order to share my love of Spanish and to connect students together from other countries in a spirit of service.

My focus has always been multiculturalism and so one year I decided our school needed an International Day. That first year sticks out as the best: students in costumes, special speakers, two school-wide assemblies, songs in multiple languages, a poster contest and more. It was a lot of work to organize ad coordinate but the end product was a very educational and multicultural day.

Now that I am at Dirigo I have undertaken what I like to call a silent revolution. The food at Dirigo is not what I am used to eating. To say it is not up to my standard would be understatement. So, I have decided to teach how to eat healthy foods under a Spanish lens. I also offer fresh fruit in my room at cost and often cook or make smoothies for my students, never once uttering a complaint about the food offered to them at school, but instead sharing with them my healthy eating habits and literally showing them healthy food and how to prepare it. I believe this showing is true leadership. I have also started a new club at Dirigo, International Club, which is a service-oriented club, and I have undertaken the digitization of freshmen portfolios.

My learning styles inventory spans many styles, with verbal, social, and physical at the top of the list. I believe this is a true representation. I am highly communicative and always seek to teach words of community and peace--we discuss many tough topics in my class and I really want to have the conversations and allow students to express themselves, even if I don’t agree, with a level of maturity that will allow them to be heard. I believe in community and collaborative style teaching and learning, which is very, very social. And, I am physical--in my class, it is okay to get up and move. I often let students move around the building to work on a project--sometimes they need to find the right space and I allow them to.

Dirigo’s mission is to develop life-long learners, and that is truly my mission as well. Students coming out of my class should possess powerful critical-thinking and problem-solving skills as well as a solid understanding of how Spanish language works.

By the end of this term, I expect to develop some powerful units and acquire some new techniques that will enhance the learning environment of my class. As always, the privilege of sharing learning space with other educators leads me to new and better methods.