Kim Travers
I am a: Kindergarten Teacher, Meade Heights Elementary School | 2018 Teacher of the Year Nominee
Building relationships with my students and their families is at the core of my instructional success. I need to reach the whole child for my students to reach their fullest potential. I seek to understand and accommodate individual differences without lowering expectations or compromising instructional objectives. Students are willing to take risks because of the relationship that has been built.
Besides relationships, students need to be engaged in their learning. It is my job to create a warm, fun, engaging environment for my students to display their academic talents. Humor and fun are embedded into each lesson and contribute to my students’ enthusiasm for learning. Cooperative learning, call and response techniques, and room transformation are just a few ways I incorporate engagement in my classroom. Eric Jensen states it perfectly when he says, “A no excuses mentality means that even if you believe it should be a students’ job to be engaged, you accept that it’s your job to engage them.”
Along with engagement, a classroom needs to be balanced with rigor and structure. I want my students to be risk takers and problem solvers in any task they are given. If things are always easy, no learning will take place. The philosophy of teaching students’ expectations and routines and consistently enforcing the structure with positive feedback is another contributor to structure in my classroom.
“Every child deserves a champion—an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection and insists that they become the best they can possibly be.” –Rita Pierson. This is the teacher I strive to be each day for my students.
