Catherine Davis Hayes
Rhode Island Teacher of the Year
Oakland Beach Elementary, Warwick
Grades 1-6, Visual Art

My teaching philosophy
I believe that our task as educators is to create opportunities for growth and success for all students, irrespective of the challenges they face. Our responsibility is to enable students to become lifelong learners, creative problem solvers, and critical thinkers. I believe that we do this through helping students to make connections across content areas, enabling them to see the connectivity between wide-ranging domains of knowledge, understand how they interconnect with and inform the development of our ideals, goals, and decisions. It is imperative to make the content we teach relevant to the real world.
We as educators cannot achieve this teaching in isolation. I believe that through collaboration, teaching communities can create ways for students to access their strengths as learners and bridge their intellectual growth across content areas and through their best learning styles. I believe the arts are an important piece of this holistic approach. The artistic process is intrinsically based in problem solving, critical thinking, and reflective practice. Teaching any content through the arts opens opportunities for students to make deeply personal connections to that content and express their understanding in unique and rich ways.

My philosophy in action
I strive for individualized instruction – taking multiple approaches and creating multiple means for students to express their ideas. I attempt to create learning opportunities that allow for students to makes choices and allow for reflection through out the process. Additionally, I make efforts to communicate the strengths and difficulties my students exhibit with their classroom teachers, helping to create a more holistic understanding of each student and establishing effective means for students to demonstrate their understanding in all content areas.

My art curriculum fosters these skills through encouraging open-ended answers to design problems. I encourage teamwork and collaboration whenever appropriate, believing strongly that nobody works in a vacuum. I employ reflective practices with students so they can review and evaluate their work in-process as well as on completion, solving problems and make revisions to improve outcome and better understand themselves as learners.

My greatest teaching accomplishment
I am very proud to have introduced an arts centered pilot program in our school, where classroom teachers have been trained in teaching strategies that incorporate using the arts to teach core academic subjects. In addition to teaching our curriculum in the visual and musical arts, the music teacher and I serve as facilitators and coaches providing as much resource as instruction in arts integrated teaching opportunities. My classroom colleagues are finding that some of their most passive, disconnected students engage in content when it is explored through a theater exercise or when they are given a choice of how to demonstrate their understanding in a way other than a written or verbal response. Often, these are the students that have always shined in my classroom and I was not aware of their academic difficulties. Our new collaborative teaching processes have allowed all of us to know our students more fully. We share our collective knowledge of student strengths and weaknesses and can direct methods of instruction far more individualized than if we were responsible for understanding these learners alone.

The most critical issues facing educators today
I feel that the most critical issues facing educators today are accountability, school reform focused on improving accountability, and the increasing gap in equity for all students to have access to a quality public education. There are two predominant philosophies for accountability working in education today. The first movement focuses on helping teachers and school administrators to improve their practice, using professional learning communities, for example, to better understand how and when learning happens, and to develop new, more effective methods of teaching based on this understanding. The second focuses on measuring overall learning through standardized mechanisms, which allow for performance comparisons across districts and states, and to use the information gained to target school supports and promote a sense of urgency for school improvement. The first movement would benefit all learners in all environments. Ironically, it is the schools that are already performing that have more freedom for this holistic approach. In theory, the second system of reform allows for more effectively targeted improvements, and holds schools to a higher standard of accountability within their communities. In teaching practice, however, it is frequently counterproductive and sometimes quite dangerous. Oftentimes, this type of “improve or be sanctioned” accountability system only widens the equity gap when schools or districts are pressured to “do whatever it takes” to improve scores on high stakes tests, working with a student population that might not have the necessary educational foundation needed to achieve in the narrow test type parameters.

Ways to resolve these issues
To resolve this discrepancy in efforts at school, reform constructive corrections are necessary to make the No Child Left Behind Act a fair, effective, meaningful tool in assessing accountability. Suggested changes have included using more comprehensive whole school performance indicators of student achievement, and funding research and development of more effective accountability systems. Emphasis needs to shift from sanctions for failing to raise test scores to positive incentives for holding states and localities accountable for making the systemic changes that improve student achievement.

One thought to inspire teachers to succeed
You are teaching tomorrow’s decision makers.

One lesson every student should learn
One plus one does not always equal two. Be creative in your approaches to reaching solutions to problems. Look at things from multiple perspectives. Question everything!

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