Advocate Expert

“Molly Robins Breathing Expert”

Within the session with Molly Robins I got a more developed view of all the entails being a teacher advocate. I think my biggest take away was that she first and foremost develops a relationship with students. Sharing her personal stories she opens up the opportunity to have her students speak. My personal tool I took from the “Resources for Teacher Advocacy” was the storytelling aspect. I mentioned that this lead with my “Empathy Leadership” style and she really touched on this when mentioning that is not only a way she would be a Advocate but also with being an Ally. This helped me understand that all the badges are intertwined and that you need to have a taste of all in your own classroom.

I think going along with the educational democracy, she mentioned her hopes for her daughter’s teacher “pushing” her or keep her going. We as advocates and as teachers are here to bring topics to light, while we wouldn’t give what exactly we are doing, just by showing them that we are being advocates gives them that “push” to do something towards something they too would like to be an advocate for.

Finally, she answered my question “How do you respond with groups that want a similar endgame but don’t appreciate how you are going about it?”. I wondered this from reading the piece about being a new teacher and hoping to be an advocate. She talked about not only giving our students the choice but also giving the other teachers the choice within working on a type of advocacy. Things like staff development give teachers a way to be an advocate without the temptation of ridicule, which I really liked and enjoyed the thought of. Like within a classroom where the isn’t a community aspect, teachers may feel shy about bringing something they are passionate about to notice. This idea on the other hand gives the “microphone” to whoever would like to speak up, and I feel it would be beneficial to the group.