Educators engage in professional learning.
One of the most engaging professional learning opportunities for me so far has been the Classrooms to Communities annual conference. I attended with a group of other teacher candidates via zoom. We were all participating in learning about how to incorporate more of the community into the classroom. The speakers in the seminars spoke about the various ways we can involve community members by inviting guest speakers to talk to our students, or new ideas for how to take the classroom outside of the typical four walls. I was particularly interested in the speaker focused on wildlife on the coast and in the oceans. British Columbia, being a coastal province, should have more teachers focused on educating students about how our actions on a daily basis affect the environment around us; including ecosystems that are seemingly far away. We need to help our students understand how the environment is interconnected and that an action in a land-locked city like Prince George can still make an impact through a chain of events down to the oceans. I was excited by this conference to see so many other educators as passionate about the environment as I am and to hear all their ideas for how we can get students to be just as excited.