What I teach toward.
I want every decision I make in a classroom — the text I choose, the question I ask, the way I group students — to be a deliberate response to who is actually in the room.
I completed my Bachelor of Education at York University after studying history in Hong Kong and South Korea. My Ontario placements took me into five public schools across the Toronto District School Board and the York Region District School Board: Junior and Intermediate classrooms, an Intermediate LEAP classroom, and an after-school program serving Grades 6 to 8.
Those settings were different enough from one another that they kept making the same point. What works is whatever answers the specific needs of the students in front of you, and finding that out is the work.
Responsive and differentiated instruction
Differentiation is planning, not goodwill. During my extended practicum in a Grade 4/5 class at Blue Willow Public School, I designed and delivered mathematics, science, and literacy lessons for a class that included students learning English and students with Individual Education Plans. Planning meant deciding in advance where the entry points were: who needed a problem represented visually before they could work with it numerically, who needed fewer steps to hold at once, and who needed a harder version of the task to stay engaged.
When I taught multiplying fractions, I built the lesson out of repeated addition first, so students had a familiar operation to reason from before meeting a new one. That experience also taught me to ask what an accommodation is actually for. A visual model that only decorates a slide has not helped anyone. The same model, used to hold a student's thinking while they work, does.
Learning through doing
Students commit to ideas they have had to handle themselves. My Blue Willow placement included pulleys and gears, forces and structures, patterning, and persuasive writing — units that reward building, testing, and arguing far more than they reward listening. In those lessons the job of the class was to produce something: a structure that held, a pattern rule that predicted the next term, a position defended with reasons.
Active work is also more honest assessment. When students build and explain, misconceptions surface immediately, while there is still time in the lesson to do something about them. The same misunderstanding can sit undetected in a quietly completed worksheet for a week.
Language, culture, and identity
Having studied in Hong Kong and South Korea, and working in English, Mandarin, and Korean, I am familiar with how much effort academic language demands and how little of that effort is visible from the front of the room.
At C.R. Marchant Middle School I taught Junior and Intermediate students, including in an Intermediate LEAP classroom. These are students building academic English at the same time as they are learning subject content, which makes the teaching problem one of access rather than ability. I relied on scaffolding, visual supports, modelling before independent work, and flexible grouping so students could work alongside peers who supported them.
How I spoke mattered as much as what I planned: slowing down, saying the same thing a second way, and naming the academic vocabulary of a subject explicitly instead of assuming it was already shared. In practice, culturally responsive teaching is largely this — choosing texts and examples that let students recognise themselves, and not treating an unfamiliar cultural reference as common knowledge.
Reflection and professional growth
Highview Public School is where I grew most, largely because I was given progressively more instructional responsibility in a Grade 4/5 classroom and had to carry it. Leading a full lesson exposes the gap between a plan that reads well on paper and one that works in a room. Timing goes wrong. A task you were sure was clear needs re-explaining. A transition you did not plan for becomes the loudest part of the day.
Mentor feedback moved me forward faster than anything else, and it was usually about something small and structural: how I gave instructions, how long I waited after asking a question, whether students knew what to do when they finished early. I have come to treat feedback and my own reflection as part of planning rather than a verdict on it. I keep the part of a lesson that worked and rebuild the part that did not.
A classroom community students can rely on
Students take academic risks in rooms that feel predictable. Across all five placements, and especially in the Beyond 3:30 after-school program at Lawrence Heights Middle School, the difference between a productive group and a difficult one usually came down to whether expectations were clear and consistently held.
So I invest in routines: how the room starts, how students get help, what happens during transitions, how we disagree. Routines are not a substitute for relationships — they are what makes relationships possible, because they free attention for the actual work.
I also want student voice to be structured rather than incidental. Discussion protocols and shared classroom agreements give quieter students a route in, instead of leaving participation to whoever is most confident. A class where students expect to be treated fairly, and expect to be asked what they think, is a class where more of them are willing to be wrong out loud. That is usually where the learning is.
Each placement referred to here is documented in more detail in the experience case studies, alongside the photographs and curriculum materials that came out of it.