Who I am in a large part determines how I teach. Not necessarily what I teach – a lot of that has to doing with the curriculum prescribed by the Ministry of Education and another significant part to doing with the interests and ages of my students, with a much smaller portion dependant on my own interests. How I teach, though – that depends largely on me and my students.

I value structure. I do better when I’ve got a schedule planned out. It helps me make sure that I teach what I need to teach (subjects and topics) and that my week is balanced between different subjects. I set up my classroom so that we run mostly on routines: students come in and put their cubes away in order to do attendance; they hand in their work to our digital inbox before the day or to our physical one at the beginning of the day for work that was due; they pick up work that was handed to their mailboxes from the day before; then they sit down and they write in their writing journals. After lunch, they do cube-tendance again and silent read.

(Does it always work? No – but my students know what’s expected of them even when they choose not to do it.)

My grade group teaching partner is much more organic. Her classroom is set up such that although there are clear learning intentions that must (and may) be accomplished in a day, her students have the freedom to choose their own schedules. They are much more innovative in how they show their learning (which is, I believe, both a function of the classroom and a function of the work she’s done with them) and do a lot of maker-type projects.

(Does it always work? No – but her students know that failure is just the opportunity to begin again with more knowledge than before.)

I greatly admire how she teaches. I think that giving the students choice like this can be an incredible opportunity for them, and it requires them to take more control over their learning. She has incredible projects and games that she uses to lead their understanding of the concepts we both have to cover.

I know (because she’s told me) that she greatly admires how I teach. She says that the writing curriculum I’ve developed and the choice I give my students improves their writing dramatically over the year. (You can see some of my students’ writing on our class blog.) She appreciates the structure I provide in my classroom and the focus I have on preparing them for high school academics.

Yet I know that I couldn’t do what she does. I would be stressed and anxious about making sure I was covering all of the curriculum and worried I was forgetting things (my memory is part of the reason I have such a structured, routine-driven classroom in the first place). She has told me that she couldn’t do what I do. She is easily distracted and loves to be able to move from idea to idea freely.

You wouldn’t think this is a problem: we should be able to acknowledge that different people teach in different ways, just as different students learn in different ways. Unfortunately, both of us get compared to the other frequently – sometimes positively, sometimes not. And getting compared … and, more significantly, judged … in this way, in a way we would never judge our students (because they are different people who learn and show their learning in different ways), is hard on both of us. It’s hard no matter whether we’re coming out on the top or on the bottom in the comparison at hand.

I think it’s important that students and parents (and other educators!) realize that different styles of teaching are just that: different, not better or worse. (Some of) my students are just as creative as hers, able to do maker projects and explain their thinking in a variety of creative ways. (Some of) her students are just as structured and methodical in their writing and learning as mine. (Some of) our students excel at different subjects; (some of) our students struggle in certain areas; (some of) our students work hard; and (some of) our students don’t. In short: we have people in our classrooms.

I think – as teachers, as parents, as students, as a society – we have too much of a tendency to judge what is different. Students benefit from learning in a variety of different styles, from a variety of different teachers. Perhaps instead of labelling a teacher as “good” or “bad,” we could look at the learning their students are doing (often learning that the students themselves may not even know they are experiencing).

Or perhaps we could stop labelling teachers – and students, and people – altogether, and just be.