I agree with the statement that education is not what people do to you, but what you do to yourself. When I was teaching, it was really easy for this to happen in my classroom because I taught health. I taught about nutrition, hygeine, safety and other things that were relevant to the students. I taught about positive relationships, peer pressure, and decision making skills. The content that I was teaching gave me so many opportunities to make my lesson engaging for the students because it dealt with things that they did every day. It wasn't hard for them to relate their lessons to real life experiences so they tended to relate to it because they were either going through things described in the lessons, or knew someone who was. With that being said, it was easy to create an environment where students were given choice, ownership, and voice through authentic projects. If I gave my classes an assignment to do a project about a health topic, I would allow them to break into groups and create something that spoke to them. If we did a project on ways to say no to drugs, I would get a group that would rap about it, another group that would make a commercial about it, and another group that would make a skit about it. I let them present it in their own way and they came up with some really amazing things. They felt safe to express themselves because I always wanted them to be creative and created an nonjudgemental learning environment. Through this, I discovered the many talents of the students in my room while allowing them to tell me their perception of what was taught.
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