My term of service as an AmeriCorps member at Audubon Vermont has significantly helped me grow professionally and personally as a teacher. Being an environmental educator, I would regularly teach and lead programs relating to ecology or other forms of outdoor education. To me, a true teacher takes pride in knowing their students get a grasp at what they are focusing on. It is easy to simply follow a script but to adapt to the classroom, to be able to empathize with the students in terms of understanding how their mind learns, is far more difficult. It is also far more rewarding if teaching is truly something one is passionate about.

I found out right away that my co-teachers shared the same sentiments about feeling joy in seeing students learn. I noticed they used the same tactic of responding to a student’s question with another question. This teaching tool helps students retain information better by encouraging them to use their own knowledge, their own wording, and engaging the subject on another level.

While I had a similar teaching style that emphasized using your own experience to build onto new ones, my experience prior to AmeriCorps was working with adolescents and young adults. With preschoolers and elementary students, I knew I had to go more in depth and at a much slower pace for it to be effective.

Students may find it easy to disengage from a teacher lecturing them – they might stare at a bird out the window or think about what games they want to play with their friends later. However, I’ve found that it is more difficult for students to disengage if they are directly called upon to answer a question. When put into practice, I noticed more eye contact from students and less fidgeting with stic

Using students to answer their own questions or to answer mine is a tactic that I've found useful for all the age groups I worked with from toddlers to middle school students. For example, when I taught preschool students how to build a fire, I refrained from simply making one and narrating what I was doing. Instead, we built the fire together and students instructed me on what to do and why. I began by asking them where the sticks should go. Students guessed that they should go under, next to, and above the flames. To guide them towards the correct answer I then asked the class which direction the flames were moving, they told me the flames were moving “up”. I agreed and then asked, “If we want the sticks to catch the flames, where should we put them?” They responded by telling me to place the sticks above where they saw the flames so that the rising fire would catch that material. Later, I asked questions about what size of firewood to use and what smoke is. This process was more work than simply lecturing the students on what to do, but when I asked the group the same questions about fire I had earlier, I found that they could explain the steps and concepts on their own. As a teacher, hearing those answers made the time spent teaching worth it.

Being a teacher is important because the knowledge we convey, if done right, will long outlast us and even the students we are teaching. One of the key distinctions between humans and other animals is our ability to transmit cultural knowledge to a high degree. Knowledge of chemistry, math, social studies, and more would not be possible to obtain had it not been for the generations before us. That is the role of a teacher: to preserve information and develop it further.

It might seem like a stretch that a Forest Playschooler might become an environmental scientist or conservationist, however many professionals in the field began as children playing in nature. By making learning outdoors fun, I firmly believe that the children I have taught during my time at Audubon will be strong advocates for nature and some may do some work to benefit the planet. These potential outcomes would not happen without teachers inspiring their students. My AmeriCorps term has helped refine my teaching skills and these will be applicable to whatever classroom setting the future holds for me.