Teaching

Ask any teacher – their professional life is busy. And often stressful. Standards, initiatives, mandates from the government, and meetings fill one’s time and one’s mind. Rarely does the average teacher find a moment to breathe, let alone the stillness to learn and grow. Among the chaos, teachers often lack support to help them develop into the educator they strive to become. We hope the SEA can be a place of solace and groundedness – where teachers can go to return to their original goals from when they decided to become educators. A place where our collective knowledge and wisdom can make us better.

Sharing how to better help our students

Working together helps us work smarter. Education is a vastly complicated endeavor. Personalities, resources, culture, environment, values, and management all influence the needs of a particular classroom and student. The more we can unpack this complexity, the more we can share our successes and our failures, the more opportunity we gain to become efficacious teachers. We hope that thinking together and working together will help the members of the SEA figure out what really matters when working with their learners.

Sharing how to support each other as a teacher

For many, the teaching experience is an isolated one. Without context or comparison, doubtful questions arise in the mind of the teacher: am I doing well? Are the students learning? Are they engaged? Are other people struggling the way I am?

Teachers care. It’s in their nature, it’s why they devoted themselves to the profession. That care and concern can breed exhaustion by the end of a long school day due to intense psychological demands. In an era of high standards and assessments, the pressure mounts even further.

Now more than ever, teachers need to find confidence in community. Finding affirmation in their choices, hearing about the similar challenges others’ face, learning tips and tricks that can make a huge difference in management – teachers yearn for this sort of rare support. As a starting place, sharing in the SEA can fulfill this important need and help ignite a spark of confidence in teachers.

Sharing Good Practices;

Teachers need various things from their educational community. At moments, they need an ear so they can unleash frustration. More productively, they might seek out solutions to a particular problem. Sometimes they need a moment to revisit the philosophical underpinnings of their practices. Teachers may not know what they need, but witness a great strategy for starting the school day or sustaining student engagement and bring those back to their students. From the general and cultural to the specific and tactical, there are innumerable ways to find inspiration from one another.

What is a school?

While schools are typically known as a place where teachers pass on their knowledge and skills to students, schools truly possess limitless potential. Schools can act as an ever-changing community of learners where not only students but teachers and administrators engage in the educational process. School can build a shared culture between all members of the community – educators, students, parents, business, and even nature. We aspire to widen the definition of school so we may untap its possibility.