'Identifying that which is valuable in EVERY child'

I'm not sure what your childhood was like, but mine wasn't great. As we have reached the end of the academic year in schools and universities within Australia, I thought it might be useful to revisit the first question in my pedagogical framework in 'Pedagogy and Education for Life'.

"Do I identify that which is valuable in each child?"

If you have followed my work, you will have realized that my family life was problematic. For most of my early years up to the age of 17, I lived in a dysfunctional family with two alcoholic parents. I also had the devastating experience of finding my mother had died during the night after a massive heart attack. This was the result of alcoholism that left her an emaciated woman, who ate little but drank much. My father was also an alcoholic for much of my early life, although thankfully he stopped drinking when I was 12 years, when he lost his job after being found with alcohol on his breath at work.

In my case, it was my 4th Grade teacher who was the first to recognize that while I was an annoying student at times (partly due to my struggles with life at home), he saw potential in me. I now know, my behaviour was due mainly to disinterest and boredom with what he was trying to teach me. But he invested time in me, trying to find something that would capture my imagination and hence improve my behaviour.

The secret of his success as a teacher, was that he saw some hidden potential in me that no other teacher had ever been able to see.He recognized that I was bored and had significant home life problems. He turned me around by providing some unique opportunities to stretch my knowledge and motivation by trusting me to undertake some special projects in our class.

Above: An early school photo. Good luck if you can pick me!

How did he respond to my disinterest and bad behaviour?

First, he created jobs for to keep me busy and learning something in the process. His most ambitious move was to turn over full responsibility for a brand new tropical fish aquarium that he trusted me to set up and care for. He also encouraged me to learn more about the tropical fish and give talks to our class and other students about them, including their habits, food and natural environments of the fish.

Second, he ensured that my learning opportunities were pitched at a level that challenged me, rather than making me do the whole class activities which I found, easy, boring and seemingly a waste of my time.

Every teacher reading this will probably be saying, "I can't design a separate curriculum for one nuisance student!" Of course you can't, but by recognizing that my ability wasn't being stretched, and my home life was appalling, he knew he needed to do something different for his benefit and also mine. I am so grateful he did! 

As teachers we need to realize that our students come to us with different strengths, abilities and interests. To some extent, this requires us to address the diverse interests and abilities in our classrooms and adopt varied methods and content.

My early teaching experiences

Given my early school experiences, it won't surprise you that when I became a teacher I tried many innovative things to engage my students. I was always looking for things that would stretch them, widen their knowledge, and inspire them to learn new things. For example, in my second year of teaching with a Year 6 class at the time, I came across an old gramaphone on the side of the road as I drove to school. It was being tossed out. Our family had a gramaphone when I was a child. It was in our garage, still worked, and I would play old records on it. 

I stopped my car, asked the owners were they 'really' throwing it out. They said yes and I asked could I have it. I managed to push it into the large boot of my car and slowly drove the 2km to my school. I had another staff member help me to take it to my classroom. I put it the middle of the room and wondered what my students would say when they saw it. One or two knew what it was and one student said they had lots of old records in his garage. He went home (he had a lunch pass) and returned with some records. We used the gramaphone for much of the rest of the day. We listened to it, explored how it actually worked without power, wrote about it and so on. It was an incredible learning experience. I took it home and restored iy on a tiny balcony of an apartment my wife and I rented. I still have it to this day, and it is a prized object that we occasionally play for fun.

Teaching the Whole Child

I know that some teachers feel the expectations they have today as teachers are different to what I had several decades ago. But the need to encourage creativity, and develop inquiring minds that lead them to ask questions and look for explanations for things that are new to them, is critical.

In the process, we might uncover knowledge and interests that will surprise us. Schools are so regimented and programmed today, that in many ways creativity is dampened. We need to look for opportunities to widen our students worlds.

A side benefit to such an approach to teaching will I believe lead us to discover things about our students that we were unaware. In the process we might just identify in each child things that are valuable and sometimes unique. 

Thank You

Thank you to the many thousands of people who follow my blog. This is my last post for the year. My apologies for not posting on this blog last month, life has been busy.

Seasons Greeting to all!! I look forward to staying in touch in 2025.

Trevor