So, I have a confession…
Like parents, teachers are expected to avoid having favorite students. However, we cannot help that some students impact our lives in ways we never forget. I often reflect on one student, Julien*, who came into my classroom and changed how I view my role as a teacher and advocate for the diverse needs of students forever.
He taught me that while I thought I was setting him up for success, I was actually creating barriers, preventing him from demonstrating his own, independent mastery of the curriculum.
Supporting students with disabilities
Every time I gave a vocabulary quiz, Julien would answer each question, and get every single one wrong. I thought that giving him extra time and allowing him to test in another environment with fewer distractions would be helpful due to my knowledge of his IEP accommodations list, and yet every single quiz had the same result. Even so, I still believed that this quiz was an excellent measure of what Julien knew.
Barriers to learning
I am embarrassed to admit that I believed that he spent 5 hours in my classroom each week and learned next to nothing. One day, while working on his quiz, Julien said, “I can’t read it.” Julien had said this to me every single day, no matter what he was working on at the time. I would give him my best empathetic look, and say, “I’m sorry: try your best.”
This time, however, was different. When Julien said to me, “I can’t read it,” I heard “I can’t read it,” rather than “I don’t understand it,” which is how I had interpreted his statement previously. At that moment, I wondered, “What would happen if I removed the barrier of reading?”
I called Julien over to my desk, and read him the quiz, asking him to point to the correct answers. Julien got a 100% on that quiz. All this time, from October until January, I thought that Julien’s 0/10 grades accurately reflected his understanding.
I thought that Julien was experiencing these terms every single day for close to a month, but due to his disability, he would never understand. I was humiliated by how I had been causing the disability all along.
Advocating for students’ needs
My classroom environment was not meeting his needs and hindering him from feeling safe and being able to fully participate. I thought of myself as a teacher on the forefront of inclusivity and learning theory, and yet here I was putting up barriers to my students’ education.
If this was happening with Julien, even though he was advocating for his needs the entire time, how many of my other students were quietly struggling in the same way?
Creating inclusive classroom environments
This experience taught me the importance of creating an environment where I am breaking down barriers and ensuring that the diverse needs of all students are met. Dr. Katie Novak, an educational consultant who focuses on the implementation of UDL and equitable and inclusive practices says, “Learners are not disabled. Curriculum is. Systems are. But kids are not.”
Julien inspired me to become an educator whose knowledge of contemporary learning theory will drive practices that meet the needs of all students and create a safe space in which diversity is celebrated. My goal is to be able to ensure all my students succeed in engaging with grade-level mathematics content and are confident in their abilities to think critically about and construct viable arguments concerning any mathematical phenomena they choose.