Finding Joy in School
As you make decisions about how to organize your classroom, involve young children in problem solving, display their work products, and report their progress, you demonstrate to the rest of the world how you view your students and what you think they are capable of. Your classroom or care setting can be a cheerful or somber place, and the children’s faces will reflect the kind of setting they are in. Finding and expressing joy in your daily interactions with children can make the difference between children who believe in themselves as strong and optimistic about the future and those who plod through their days in care or school feeling helpless and disengaged.
The Inner Child
One of the ways you can find joy in teaching is to regularly revisit your own inner child. As teachers plan activities and work with curriculum, they need to think about goals, objectives, and logistical arrangements. Equally important, however, is to consider how children will experience the curriculum. Even though we understand theoretically why a child stands endlessly at the water table, pouring water back and forth, we may not remember or appreciate the tactile satisfaction which is part of that experience. The wonder that we see on a young child’s face the first time he sees a monarch butterfly emerge from its cocoon or discovers that yellow and red paint combine to make orange may be long forgotten in our own memory. So get down on the floor or sit beside your children and participate! A child who seems reluctant to smear finger paint across a wet paper will be much more likely to take the risk if you do it too. Teachers regularly structure activities for children or put materials in front of children and ask or expect the children to use them. The teacher who experiences curriculum with the children is in a better position to make decisions about how to engage and support them.
Experiencing the curriculum with the children will also help you understand the inner child in each of the students you teach. Often that is the child you need to reach to really understand how to make the curriculum work. Your first impressions will most likely span the gamut from children who seem reluctant, curious, shy, enthusiastic, hostile, laid back, or ambivalent. The teacher who is distant and aloof will never know who he or she is really working with; that teacher’s image of the child will continue to be informed by what others say and by impressions that may not accurately represent the child within.
Building trust requires connecting with each child on a personal level, so that they know you care about them and what happens to them, are curious about what they think, and firm with them when they need guidance. These things give children the emotional security they need to share with you their impressions, confidences, questions, and fearsinformation you can use to develop, adapt, and personalize whatever curriculum you use to best represent what your children know and do.