Ida M. Dziura
New Hampshire Teacher of the Year
Londonderry South Elementary School, Londonderry, NH
Grade 4, all subjects

My teaching philosophy
The most basic tenet to my educational philosophy is that every child is important. I expect that my students will respect their teacher. Equally important, I expect that they will respect their classmates and, in return, I will demonstrate respect for each of them in ways they will notice and understand. I believe that learning is an incredibly complex process, often complicated by such a diversity of physical, emotional and social issues that teachers must be active members of professional teams to succeed. Educational teams must constantly seek to expand and enhance their collective ability. Team members must be willing to share their current expertise and demonstrate their willingness to acquire new expertise in areas that will advance the team's ability to effectively deal with students’ learning problems.

My philosophy in action
From the first day of school, emphasis is placed upon creating a community of learning within my classroom. It is important that each student comes to feel comfortable in this community, that each becomes convinced that he/she can contribute and is convinced it is worthwhile to assist and support as others seek to contribute. The emphasis must be on learning, not teaching. A teacher's strengths are important assets to be drawn upon in facilitating the learning process. However, they should not become restrictive criteria for selecting methodology. The learning styles and barriers to learning among the students being taught must provide the focus for methodology selection.

My greatest teaching accomplishment
A teacher's most significant accomplishment resides in what happens in his/her classroom on a day-to-day basis. A spectacular breakthrough with a challenging student or a lesson that holds the entire class in rapture will be memorable. However, I feel the ultimate measure of my contribution will be evidence demonstrating that my efforts were dedicated to creating the ideal learning environment for the day’s group of students. I take great pride in my commitment to create a classroom brimming with activity, a place where one experiences a kaleidoscope of creativity, and a place where student wonder, explore and behave as a community of learners.

The most critical issue facing educators today
The No Child Left Behind act encompasses several of the critical issues facing public education today. It focuses heavily on the need to measure educational progress and to establish accountability for that progress. The act has thrust the issues of assessment and accountability into the forefront of educational debate. It has also focused some considerable attention on the issues of what constitutes appropriately-qualified educators, what constitutes a safe school and what is to be done regarding schools deemed to have failed in their mission.

Ways to resolve this issue
To this point, most discussion has focused upon district-wide and school-wide aspects of these issues. However, it is in the classroom where the rubber meets the educational road, so to speak, and these issues contain far-reaching implications of the role of the classroom teacher. Accountability is an issue with a long and checkered history of attempts at introduction at the classroom level. Difficulties that have always created substantial roadblocks to any widespread introduction include disagreement over appropriate measures of teacher-student success, variables in the barriers to student learning that could cloud comparisons of success between teachers with different classes, and inquiries into the resources provided to teachers to affect student learning. I will leave it to other educators, with more substantial expertise in the area, to struggle with the measurement problem as the accountability issue filters downward to the classroom level. Hopefully the decided resolution can be one that I feel comfortable with: perhaps something along the lines of a gains-based approach, which seems to harbor some significant merit. However, it is in the areas of "barriers to student success" and "resources to affect student learning" that I feel comfortable providing comment with a certain degree of authority based upon my experiences in teaching.

Dealing with barriers to student learning is the definition of teaching. Granted, due to some very significant barriers, the teacher's role may be somewhat limited in being an advocate for children in arenas outside the school. However, even that falls within the professional responsibilities of a teacher, and every dedicated teacher will have stories demonstrating how their advocacy made a difference. I believe that most barriers to learning that a teacher encounters can be dealt with through appropriate adjustments to the learning environment. Further, those adjustments will be well within the teacher’s control if there is sufficient expertise regarding the theory of learning, lesson development and differentiated instruction.

This brings me to the resources provided to support the teaching effort: team, training and time.
A teaching team is as important to assuring successful learning by students as a medical team is to hospital care of patients. Brain research in recent years has yielded an explosion of new understanding in the way the brain works. Implications to learning and to learning disabilities are quickly emerging from that explosion. Universal learning design principles are now being implemented to assure up-front planning for very necessary curriculum flexibility rather than pursuing traditional afterthought, add-on accommodations. Creative innovations providing truly effective differentiated instruction are developed each day. In light of this rapid proliferation in the very tools we need to achieve the requirements of the No Child Left Behind act, there must the be recognition that no individual teacher can know all nuances of diagnosing each problem and prescribing and implementing each remedy. Some help is certainly available through the use of technology in accessing additional resources. However, the only complete answer is providing a teaching team that can grow in their collective expertise to match the problems they must solve.

What is described above makes clear the critical nature of training. Once accepted as the sole responsibility of the professionals, schools, as an on-going necessity to achieving their mission, now accept training. Professional development will, and it always should, contain a strong component that is personal to the interests and future plans of the individual. However, today's mission for schools can never be achieved unless a very substantial portion of that training is job-embedded and dedicated to building the personal and team capacities needed to analyze what students need and to identify effective ways in which to deliver it.

More than any other resource that can be made available to teachers, time represents the entity that can offer most significant progress towards achieving the requirements of the No Child Left Behind act. I began teaching in 1964. It is a fact that, since that time, the body of knowledge available to be learned has increased exponentially. There is no question that I expect my students today to learn substantially more than did my students in 1964. I can personally attest that the role of the teacher has become more complicated by the demands to adjust to both increased expectations for student learning and the information explosion regarding the professional tools now available to make this happen. Yet, my school year is structured essentially the same as it was in 1964. My school district has been exceptional in providing summer and after-school workshop opportunities for teachers. I attend as many as I can schedule, and that extra time provided has made a difference. However, I am convinced that to get truly serious about achieving No Child Left Behind requirements, schools will need to restructure the school year in more novel ways that provide students more time to learn, and also provide teachers more strategizing time, especially in teams.

One thought to inspire other teachers to succeed
To those colleagues who are closer to my end of our teaching career spectrum, I ask whether this discourse sounds familiar: "What's wrong with the public schools today? I remember when 40 kids in a classroom who would sit and listen to what we said. They learned, and if they misbehaved, they were careful not to let their parents know for fear of being reprimanded again. What ever happened to those days?"

For certain, we teach now in what sometimes seems like a different world. We seemed to have uncovered many more new problems to deal with then those we have resolved. Expectations have been magnified to levels that often seem unrealistic, and criticism has come forth in volumes and from sources that frequently shock us. As these thoughts barge their way into my mind late in the evening as I sit correcting a set of student writing drafts, I try to keep a perspective by focusing upon certain things: the importance of teachers to children today, the evolution of educational technologies, and that gleam in a student's eye or smile on his face when you help to create that learning moment.

One lesson every student should learn
Learn to question, learn to wonder and learn to take risks.

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