Last Friday, I had my first Professional Development Day with School District 57. The day I planned out included a morning session called “POPEY” – the Provincial Outreach Program for the Early Years. POPEY’s mandate is to increase K-3 educators’ capacity to support all primary English literacy learners, particularly diverse and struggling students in the classroom. In my opinion, this is a noble effort. In the afternoon, I joined the session lead by Dr. Sinclair for an afternoon keynote for the Lhulh’uts’ut’en – We Come Togther Virtual Indigenous Professional Development Day Conference. I found both sessions inspired and useful for me as I embark on my path to becoming a teacher.
The “POPEY” session was focussed on Effective Planning for Comprehensive Literacy Instruction. The presenters argued, as educators, we need monitoring, feedback, and course correction for each learner because every learner consumes information differently. I nodded in agreement with this statement because although all learners have some attributes in common, what makes us different is also what focusses our interests and habits in idiosyncratic ways. An educator’s role is to provide guidance and scaffolding, designing instruction that is flexible, effective, and differentiated. In other words, a teacher is observant, understands, recognizes, and supports individual differences in learning. The hosts of the session showed there are four general types of leaners – Auditory, Tactile, Kinesthetic, and Visual. That is an easy way to understand each leaner and to decide on what combination of techniques is best suited to engage most learning styles. More observation with individuals and small groups provides more information to help educators to plan effectively—to include more purposeful activates for leaners. In conclusion, I learned from this session the importance of being inclusive to everyone, observant in the classroom of different learning styles and learning needs. Based on strengths, needs, and interests, educators deliver successful routines and strategies of teaching.
After the POPEY Session, I joined Dr. Sinclair’s keynote speech, which celebrated and promoted indigenous learning. Dr. Sinclair emphasized how there are any number of ways to include indigenous stories, language, and learning methods into classroom curriculum. Dr. Sinclair emphasized how important it is to improve the classroom experience for aboriginal learners because it is a priority to ladder more aboriginal people into key positions in society, from where they can work to better the lives of other aboriginal people. One method of indigenization that I find interesting is the idea of doing nature walks where the teacher labels trees, grass, plants, as well as animals and birds with classical Latin names, English names, and aboriginal names. Young learners would be presented with the aboriginal names on equal footing as to the Latin and English names, plus on some occasions an Elder could be invited to talk about traditional aboriginal relationships with plants and animals, tell stories about the environment and its inhabitants, and discuss the importance of aboriginal language in respect to its intimate connection with the land. I found the talk thought-provoking and forward-looking.
Overall, my first Professional Development Day was a success in respect to it being informative, inspiring, and useful. I will take the lessons learned during the two sessions and integrate them into my teaching philosophy. Specifically, I look forward to researching learning styles and using that knowledge when facilitating information to young learners. Furthermore. I think I can exercise creative approaches to indigenizing exercises that involve the use of aboriginal languages and approaches to learning such as story-telling.
