“…becoming a teacher is a learning process that needs to include a focus not only on teaching strategies, but also on personal awareness and development of an individual’s emotional intelligence, with the implication for integrating both the cognitive and the affective domains early in the teacher learning process. This means that learning to teach must include conversations that reveal what teacher learners believe about the people they may teach.”

While reading this article, I found myself wondering about the harmful effects of teachers failing to recognize and challenge their biases. While I’d like to think of all teachers as being completely bias-free, I know that teachers are only people, and most people (I dare say all people) have grown up absorbing misinformation and unjust beliefs as if it were in the very air we breathe. Sometimes people struggle to become aware of these feelings and beliefs, making it impossible to overcome them; we cannot challenge what we cannot see.

When I read about the experiences of Kirkland’s students, I wondered if any of them had realized at any point that they were entering this mostly Black and Latino, urban high school, a school quite different than the ones they had experienced when they were adolescents, aware of the assumptions they were bringing with them. Kirkland certainly recognized them, but did they? Bias can only be challenged when people realize they have it in the first place, which is why conversations about these biases, while they can sometimes feel uncomfortable or embarrassing, are necessary.

Before my first day of student teaching, my CT informed me that one of the classes she would work with had 5 students with especially low reading levels. These were the students with whom we would do small group work. At the time, I believed I had not made any assumptions about these 5 students, since I knew nothing about them yet. However, when I saw a list of their names on my first day of student teaching, I was surprised to see that 2 of these 5 students were female. The problem was that I felt surprised. I didn’t realize that I had been expecting 5 males until I saw my own reaction to seeing 2 females on the list. I had made an unfair assumption that the students with the lowest reading levels were likely to be male. I felt ashamed of my assumption, but I also felt afraid. What if all 5 of those students had happened to be male? Would I have even been made aware of this bias? Would my beliefs have been solidified instead of challenged? These thoughts and feelings are not always easy to pinpoint, but I know I must become aware of every assumption I make so that I do not end up blind to my own personal bias.