Wrapping up my student teaching experience, I have reflected a lot on just how much I have grown. I'm comfortable in front of the classroom (both elementary and high school) and I'm on top of planning my lessons. I apply my teaching philosophy each day, which is that art is about problem solving, personal expression, mental health, and exploration. I feel ready to be a teacher, and now my focus includes the job hunt. This is such a great feeling- to be confident enough to apply and interview for actual positions. I want to work on my interview skills in the coming weeks as I feel that I can improve in this area. I can't wait to have my own classroom.
Personally, these experiences mean that I am growing as an individual. I feel like a real adult, and this shift in my focus to "adult things" like being a professional, good teacher and landing a job represents the end of an era and the beginning of a new stage in my life. My art piece is a practice still life drawing that I made to help myself articulate the steps of drawing a still life before teaching the lesson the next day. This represents the shift: I walk into the classroom and I am the adult in the room, the teacher, when for so long I have been the child in the room and the one who is eager to learn. My preparation and teaching reflect this shift, as I truly own is and work extremely hard at my "job" of being a student teacher.
In the future, I want to continue to work on creating creative lessons for my students, and I hope to create a lesson bank that I can pull from and add to for many years. My confidence is there, now I just need more experience and to have my own classroom in order to grow. I feel that the lesson bank is part of this growth for me and I want to spend more time developing this. My mentor teachers have helped me establish my teaching style, my confidence, and I know all about art theory from my coursework. It's time to take away all of the training wheels and go for it, making it my own.