Peterson: Every child is special
For 2007 National Teacher of the Year Andrea Peterson, the way to engage children in learning is to “get deep into their lives and form relationships with them.”
“When kids know adults believe in them, they start to believe in themselves. It is infectious,” Peterson told the audience at a Focus on Education Lecture March 31.
Peterson teaches music at Monte Cristo Elementary School in Granite Falls, Wash. But music is merely a jumping off point, as she integrates math, history, reading, and other academic subjects into her music lessons.
For example, as students read some of the Series of Unfortunate Events novels, they learned about character, plot, theme, and other elements of fiction in their regular classrooms.
In music class, Peterson had her students write theme songs for each of the main characters -- based on all kinds of musical genres from Mozart to rap -- while they learned about rhythm, musical notation, major and minor keys, and much more.
In a talk filled with personal stories, Peterson described how taking the time to reach out to students can make a huge difference in their lives. An incident with Travis, a struggling, unmotivated 8-year-old, was a “changing point for me as a teacher,” Peterson recalled.
One day, after Travis had fixed the classroom pencil sharpener, Peterson was amazed to find out he liked fixing things and spends his weekends working in his father’s auto shop.
“Here was a child most teachers had written off, who actually turned out to be really bright and to have a special intelligence, although he didn’t process information the same way as most other students,” she said.
“Once all this became known, teachers started working with him differently,” she said. “We saw his self-esteem grow, and by the time he reached the sixth grade, he was reading on a sixth-grade level.”
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