Stephanie Sparks

AFTCO Reflection

2/25/2019

SPEC_ED_420

Valencia Toomer was the key note speaker of the AFTCO I attended this past Saturday,

there was also a portion on CAPS and mental health but what really stuck with me was Mrs.

Toomer and how she wants us to “Level up” as professionals and future teachers because we

owe more to our students. This included a band aid exercise, a talk about equity and equality and

thinking about situations where more digging would have to be done to come to the root of the

problem. This also gave me a lot of time to think and reflect, so here are my thoughts and

reflections.

First I’d like to address the equality talk. I feel a lot of us are taught to treat everyone

equal and be fair is nice, but we should be better than nice. Mrs. Toomer told us a lot of us

learned that fair was how we give everyone the same and how that’s second grade thinking. I

agreed so much with that, a professor I had in the past even had a saying she told us when

dealing with absences and her policies that “Equal doesn’t mean fair” which probably sounds a

bit harsh to some, but we need to be equitable. It got me thinking more and that’s what people

are sort of thinking of when they say treat people equally. We had someone in the group define

equitable as ‘giving everyone what they need and making sure their needs are being met’ in

teaching that is so important. Not all of our learners are going to be at standard and it’s not fair to

hold them to that. We have to work to include interventions and give support to make sure it

happens, without doing that we are failing our kids, they aren’t failing.

Another thing I liked that linked to being equitable and really made it stand out was the

band aid analogy. We had people with broken collar bones, sprains, broken bones, and all sorts
Stephanie Sparks

AFTCO Reflection

2/25/2019

SPEC_ED_420

of things that we were supposed to ‘heal’ but all we had was a band aid. A band aid won’t heal a

collar bone. Shoving information at students and teaching them one way won’t help them learn

especially when we have students who are ELL’s and students with special needs. Even taking in

to account the different learning styles of learners and the diversity in the classroom the band aid

method of covering things up or quick fixing doesn’t work.

Even just looking at a situation thinking that we might have all the information can be

unhelpful. Questioning, probing and finding more out doesn’t do anything but help you gather

more data to help fix a problem or find the root of a situation. I think a lot of the time it’s so easy

to see something as it is or to accept the information that we’re given that questioning doesn’t

always come to mind at first. It’s also why we need to get to know students and understand them.

I’ve always thought I’d know to do this or know the right things to ask. But, hearing the

situations Mrs. Toomer gave us made me realize how limited I’ve made my questioning.

Sometimes I’d only have one or two questions for a situation when there were so many options.

Getting to know students and talking with them and others really can open so much more up and

give more opportunities for understanding.

By the end of this I could relate what we talked about to students and how we fail them

when we stop trying to see things different ways, questioning them, knowing them, and not

looking for more resources and interventions to help.