Taking Risks

As a teacher of young children, I often extoll the virtues of taking risks as a crucial way of learning. It is easy to see how a child attempting to balance a block on a tall tower, jump from high step or speak in Morning Meeting can lead to learning and growing.
It is scarier to think about taking risks as a teacher. Some people expect teachers to be an authority, to know for certain the answers. But that is not the kind of teacher I am, nor is it the kind of learner I want to model for the children. I know that through taking risk, I learn and grow and that the dialectical process of reflection and action that Paulo Freire calls praxis takes place.

So what does it mean for a teacher to take risks? What are the conditions that need to exist for teacher, children, or any kind of learner to take a risk? To take risks means that I will try new things, new ways of teacher and learning, and that I will reflect and learn from the new experience. To take a risk means that I will fail, that I will make mistakes, and that I have the chance to learn from these mistakes. It means that I have to have the support of my colleagues and supervisors and the trust of the children's families. And I have to trust myself.

This summer, I attended a conference at the Boulder Journey School in Boulder Colorado. Several of the teachers at the school gave presentations about how taking risks had lead to professional growth. For some of them, this meant trying new things in the classroom, like painting a huge wall with magnetic paint, only to realize that the magnetic paint wasn't strong enough to hold the magnets they had planned to use to make ramps and tunnels with the children. For another teacher (who was used to actively engaging with the children and directing play) taking a a risk meant sitting back and observing the children more closely to see what they were learning and exploring without her intervention.
At my school, we work on an emergent curriculum, which each year at the beginning of school, this feels incredibly risky. New families, nervous about their child's first school experience or their kindergarten readiness, don't have the reassurance of a prescribed curriculum, and while I can offer them the knowledge that we teach all the necessary skills during the course of the year (and follow the PA Early Learning Standards), I cannot tell them that we will be studying pumpkins in October and rain forests in January. I trust that we as classroom teachers will observe the children's interests, foster their curiosity, and spin these pieces into new explorations, studies, and projects.

With this blog, I hope to take risk another kind of risk. I hope to share my learning process with a community of families, teachers, thinkers, and learners. I hope to be candid about my risks, my successes and failures, and my learnings.