Authentic Environment

I just finished The Gift of Imperfection last night. It's an incredible book about how to live authentically while dealing with shame, anxiety and fear. It got me thinking about the kind of environment I want to create in my classroom this year and how I want to express myself with my students.

I have a tendency to wear my heart on my sleeve, as one of my professors who monitored my student teaching told me. I've been taught that to be a teacher is to be an actor, to hide how you are really feeling from your students. I'm not very good at that. And I don't think that is a bad thing. While I definitely need to work on staying calm and not taking frustration or fear out on my students, I want them to know how I feel. I want them to see when I am proud of them, or when I know they can do better, or when I share their sadness that something didn't pan out. I want them to see that it is okay to express yourself and to feel things. If I can't be authentic with them, how can I expect them to be authentic with me?

I want to go about creating this environment in a couple of ways. With my advanced classes, I want a lot of student input on what they want to do and what is interesting to them. I tried to do that last year, but with many students feeling angry about getting a new teacher, differences in teacher expectations between  me and the woman I replaced and my own feelings of intimidation, it never happened. This year I've chosen my own students and want to start the year off with several discussions, using the Socratic circle method. I want to address

• What do you want to learn this year?
• What worked well last year?
• What did not work well last year?
• What are our goals as a class?
• What kind of obstacles might arise and how can we deal with them?
• What kind of environment do we want in our class and how can we create it?
  

I hope that we can improve the atmosphere form last year, where there was a lot of gossip and whining behind my back or to me behind students' backs. It just made everyone frustrated.

I'd like to take a similar approach with my beginning classes. I won't know many, if any, of my beginning students and they will have a variety of reasons for being in my class. Some will be there

• because it is required to take a fine art
• because they've taken drama elsewhere an enjoyed it
• because it sounds fun
• because they got put in there by the counselor
• because they have friends in the class
• because they want to learn a specific skill
• because they think it will be easy

It is difficult to deal with all of these different motives. I hope to have an open discussion about what they want from the class and what I can offer them. It might open their eyes to what drama can be, or at least give them an idea of what to expect. Last year I had a lot of trouble with "I thought this class was going to be..." I'm hoping to address those expectations and my expectations early on.

It is nice to have an idea of things I want to do in the first week. Last year I had lots of unit laid out, but not much prep for what to do at the beginning of the year. So we just jumped right in before people had a chance to get to know each other or figure out what the class was going to be. Part of that was because I didn't have a clear vision myself. I hope that won't be as true this year.