What Students Need

What do students really need from me? 

This is not a new question.  We ask it every.single.day.  We ask this as we listen to them read.  We ask this as we conference with them about their writing.  We ask this as we look over a math assessment.  What does this student need from me?  How can I help them grow?

This weekend I read a post from Ruth Ayres Writes titled "Kids Don't Need Teachers for Learning Information." (Please check out the post!) It stuck with me and I kept thinking about it, going back to it, and rereading it.  I love posts like that because they challenge me, change me, and help me to grow.  In her post, Ruth Ayres points out the amount of information that is at the fingertips of our students but that we need to work to cultivate their curiosity and critical thinking.

And she is so right...my students come to me with needs. They need me to give them love.  Everyday.  They need a safe environment to make mistakes, take challenges, and be themselves.  They need to be challenged.  And they need to learn to read.

As a K-2 teacher of intervention, my job is to help my students become independent readers so that they can access all that information.  So that they can use that information to make judgements, think critically, form opinions.  And become leaders.

And so I will continue to ask this question with every lesson that I teach:
 what do my students really need from me?

Because it is my job to fight for them...
 push them...
 and support their reading so that they can become critical consumers of information.

Em