Educators demonstrate a broad knowledge base and an understanding of areas they teach.
I told a story that is quite related to this standard in a previous blog post. The post was discussing the practicum placement I did in a grade 7 class and how nervous I was to teach these students; I didn’t think I was smart enough to do it. I challenged myself to go way outside my comfort zone and teach the students an entire math unit in algebra in my time with the students. I must be honest and say I spent a lot of hours teaching myself algebra all over again, I hadn’t done math like this in more than 6 years. I had to reteach myself to teach the students. I spent a lot of time reteaching myself because I wanted to teach the students the best I possibly could and make the math feel as simple as possible for them. That was my goal because when I went through school, I always felt some teachers made things more complicated than they needed to be, so simple was the goal. I am very pleased to say all the outside hours I put in and the teaching I did on this topic, the overwhelming feedback from the students was how surprised they were with how easy it was to do algebra. I was so proud of myself and so happy that I put in the extra effort to find the best way to teach this to the students and that it paid off. The big take away I had from this experience and what relates a lot to this standard is that as elementary teachers especially we might not know it all, we might not be experts in the entire curriculum, but we can get there, we can teach ourselves, its ok that we don’t know it all! If there was any message I will keep with me for the rest of my teaching career it is that I don’t need to always have the answer, the beauty of teaching is that we are forever learning, and what we don’t know we can find out!