Teacher Beliefs Statement

All students can learn with provided opportunities to soar. Over time, I have
added the latter half to this coined teacher phrase per my teaching and personal
experiences. When listening to students thinking, at any age, students are very
knowledgeable. At the surface level, many students know how to go through the motions
of learning (i.e. share their transparent thoughts and make facial expressions to show their
emotional response or connection) and demonstrate some form of problem solving while
completing a given task. As a constant commonality observed throughout my teaching
experience, all students have various entry points and carry with them misconceptions
due to all teachers having different pet peeves, teaching styles and demands placed on
them; however, with the right tools and practice beyond the school year bookends, all
students can learn to strengthen their ability to justify their thinking, make real-world
connections and self-advocate, no matter their learning environment.
According to Piaget, scheme building, or what Dewey (1938) and Rodgers
(2002) refer to as continuity, is the process of building upon ones prior knowledge and
experience. When thinking at what Taggart (2005) deems the Dialectical Level, students
home life, culture (The ever-changing values, traditions, social and political
relationships, and worldview created, shared and transformed by a group of people bound
together by a combination of factors, Nieto, 1999, p. 48); peer to peer and adult
interactions are a few determining factors that effect ones viewpoint and determine if an
experience is holistically good or bad. Most memorable, good or bad,
experiences, however, can supersede an initial experience and in a given context,
determine how similar life events are categorized. Dewey (1938) said it best, The
principle of continuity of experience that every experience both takes up something from
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Teacher Beliefs Statement

those which have gone before and modifies in some way that quality of those which
come afterThere is some kind of continuity in every case (p. 35).
When moving from teaching fifth grade in an affluent area to teaching third
grade in a Title I, underprivileged setting, my mantra of being fair, firm and consist
slightly changed. After spending my first Title I school year (2014-2015) learning the
population, school culture and third grade curriculum, I noticed that students were use to
high teacher turnover rates. Within my first week, students asked me, What school did
you come from? and as a pattern, Are you coming back next year? inquired at the end
of every school year. To help alter this mindset and reroute students critical reflection of
others back to self, I thought about my then four years of teaching experience, student
feedback over the years and what I would want more of as a student to help motivate me
to excel before developing my revised mantra: Build self-efficacy, trust and the
academics will come. When becoming team lead the following school year (2015-16), I
ran with my intellectual, complex, rigorous and emotional reflection (Rodgers, p.844) by
infusing my new mantra in all team settings and modeling my vision for students in
efforts to influence change within all third-grade students, thus, yielding results. Not only
did the mindset of students shift, the school pattern of being an inverted pyramid, where
the opposite of 80% of students grasping grade-level content (tier 1), 15% needing
additional scaffolding (tier 2) and 5% needing 1-on-1 intervention (tier 3), shifted rightside up and students were able to transfer their knowledge, test-taking skills and toolbox
strategies onto county benchmark assessments with less difficulty! When comparing my
first two years in my Title I setting, my third grade team has set the school bar for scoring
in the desired top county percentiles, but most importantly, modeled the way for how to

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Teacher Beliefs Statement

work within barriers opposed to around them.

Spiraling back to what students know, another commonality is that students
need help with framing their thinking. Students need help learning how to make a variety
of connections to their learning, using school (text-text and text-self) and real-world
(text-world and text-movie) experiences. Rodgers (2002) uses the phrase thinking to
learn to highlight the importance of inquiry and reflection as [this is] a standard
toward which all teachers and students must strive (p. 842). To help students reasoning
beyond the surface level and in the in-depth realm, we, as teachers, must start with
students social-emotional needs. To build up students self-efficacy and their trust to
share their thinking and be vulnerable to disagree and alter their thinking, strong and
meaningful relationships must be built. This Fairfax County Public Schools coined
phrase, was a countywide them from when I started teaching in 2011and honestly, it fell
through the cracks. Students need to be validated and know you care. In terms of
academics, specific positive behaviors need to be cited with small, meaningful goals
attached to ensure growth. When sharing the positives and how to go to the next level, it
has been my experience amongst students, teammates and even collaborating colleagues,
all stakeholders soar with embracing this provided opportunity, as learners feel safe,
open-minded, validated and often encouraged to share with others how to succeed.
When instructing students, choice, data collection and reflection are three
foundational factors that are needed to build a strong house of learners. Choice, or
differentiation, must be embedded from the focus lesson down to the student practice.
Students must be exposed to a variety of teaching and learning strategies (i.e. thinkalouds, number talks; whisper reading to building fluency, counting up and down when

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Teacher Beliefs Statement

adding a subtraction), as these are opportunities for students to learn how to think and
apply their thinking. In terms of data collection, students must be exposed to end goals
and invested in the process of knowing their baseline data, when they have accomplished
their goal and how to climb to the next level at a constant rate. From experience, I moved
from the traditional gradebook and recording all grades to recording color-coded pre- and
post- assessment scores to show growth; however, students must observe and record their
own data for them to take prided in their more meaningful next steps. Similarly, critical
reflecting is also important throughout the focus lesson and even from day-to-day, in all
settings. Whenever one is thinking, one should be applying their schema and making
connections to see how math and real-world examples can be found everywhere you go.
One can make the assumption that before students can latch onto the provided
opportunities to soar, we must first get to know our students. We must see what makes
them tick and shut down; understand their learning styles and how they are implemented
in social and academic settings. It is then that students will do anything for you because
they know they are loved, cared for, heard and challenged. Subsequently, investments that
promote life-long learning are made from built strong and meaningful relationships. As a
secret, we are all students and learn from each other. As our awareness levels are raised
and we begin to realize this more and more, we begin to open up the doors for more
authentic communication and deeper discourse that lead to a greater understanding of
grade-level content. When teaching, the goal is not for students to learn at the same rate,
but rather, be on the same path of progression, constantly honing, refining and justifying
learned skills to become more critical and complex thinkers.

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Teacher Beliefs Statement

Brown Rice

7/17/16