The Lifelong Learner

You teach because you love to learn.

Teaching is a great way to continuously deepen your understanding of my content area; after all, to teach it well, you have to know it from all angles and be creative about how you express that. You want the kids you teach to really connect with the content because that shows they’re engaged and grappling with it.

You value: voice, respect, courage

Yellow illustration of a smiling man wearing a sweater and pointing his finger upwards like he has an idea. Next to him floats a brilliant lightbulb, and he is being surrounded by a swirl of papers and floating abstracted words and mathematics.
 

Back-to-school tips

Lifelong Learners are always stretching for ways they can expand their own knowledge, insight, and practice. Use the new year as a catalyst for some of these changes.

  • Change up your classroom environment to try something new in the new year, to push yourself with new practices, and to keep things fresh. A new layout will shift dynamics...and your teaching.

  • Find someone who you can mindmeld with, whether that's just to vent, or to dig deep into content queries, classroom management, or lesson planning.

Meet a BPS Lifelong Learner

selfie of woman with medium-dark skin tone and dark hair smiling and gesturing at a classroom wall

Sadiyyah Mahdi

Sadiyyah is a graduate of the Accelerated Community to Teacher program and teaches chemistry, physics and environmental science at Madison Park High School. Madison Park is BPS’s only technical vocational high school, combining academic and vocational education.

How she came to teaching: Sadiyyah has a background in biology and an advanced degree in geography. After working as a substitute, she sought out teacher prep programs that would allow her to work as she was trained and came to Boston for the ACTT. Teaching is a natural fit for this knowledge-hungry individual who believes that “teaching is learning.”

What keeps her motivated: Sadiyyah loves watching her students piece together information to develop a power they didn’t have before. She creates moments in her classroom where her students can own the learning, through debates or discussions that they can become invested in.

How she’s trying to grow: Sadiyyah is developing her confidence in her ability to read the room, recognizing when to move things forward and when to let the conversation grow. She’s also trying to think long-term for her students, considering where they will get value from the work...beyond a standardized test.

What she seeks to nurture in her students: Sadiyyah finds ways to make science relevant to her students’ daily lives. For example, conversations about environmental racism and justice bring big and sometimes abstract topics into the aperture of her students’ lived experiences.