This year I have been interviewing past students to find out where their schooling and life has taken them. This work has led me to reflect on my own professional pathway.
When I graduated university with a Bachelor of Arts and a Diploma of Education, I knew it would be the beginning of my learning journey. It was one thing to have a piece of paper saying I was qualified to teach, and quite another thing to develop the skills and understanding to teach effectively.
The longer I taught, the more I realised that there was so much more to learn and I returned to University studies to complete a Graduate Diploma in Educational Administration and then a few years later, a Bachelor of Education. Later still, I completed a Master of Education and thought that all that formal additional study and the plethora of professional development short courses I attended, would surely give me the skills I would need to do my work effectively.
What I learnt then and I constantly tell my students now, is that learning is a lifelong activity. As school curriculums change and adapt to social and technological change, I and every other teacher is back on the learning path, developing the new skills needed. This is something that every one of my students will experience.
This latest surge in technology-based curriculum now sees me racing to develop my skills with Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop so I can keep a few lessons in front of my Digital Art class.
My weekends are spent grappling with the Sphero Balls videos and learning to write block code to control their movement, sound and lights. This will allow me to teach coding to my STEAM class.
How did this happen to someone who trained as an English/ Humanities teacher? A teacher’s journey really is about lifelong learning, and actually all the challenges that the school and the curriculum has thrown at me, has made my life and career so much more enjoyable.