Jamila Brooks, Berkeley teacher education graduate, reflects deeply on practice in order to focus on equity in her classroom
I got this.
That’s what Jamila Brooks was thinking when she confidently entered Berkeley Graduate School of Education’s teacher preparation program for elementary teachers. As one of the more experienced candidates in her cohort, with years of work in education policy as well as in the classroom under her belt, Brooks had set her sights on learning how kids learn and what makes a good lesson.
Brooks certainly learned that. And much more. The most powerful tool she learned at Berkeley is one she uses every day in her classroom, sometimes every moment: self-reflection.
“I now know I’m not always the greatest teacher, but mistakes are proof of learning. And you're actually doing that in the Berkeley program because more than you're failing, you are succeeding,” Brooks said. “Something may not work and that's okay. So I ask myself, ‘what can I learn from this?’ And that’s what I want the kids to do, too.”
Brooks recalls an experience familiar to all teachers, when she provided a piece of instruction to students that contradicted something else she had just said. When a student pointed that contradiction, Brooks replied with “Oh! You are so right! Thank you.”
“I can learn from them, too. I was just so excited that this first grader was like, `hey wait a minute.’ And I could say to her, `that’s right!’” Brooks said. “It’s something I learned at Berkeley: it's a constant reflective process.”
One class discussion at Berkeley that left an impression on Brooks concerned ways to address a child who is having a tantrum. Initially, her response was to take away something special in order to compel compliance (“no ice cream!”). That approach, her professor caused her to consider, would not address root causes, only suppress behaviors. And those tantrums would likely happen again.
“It never occurred to me to get to the root of it,” she said. “I learned that I do have to check myself sometimes and realize this behavior is coming from somewhere. And I need to figure out what the root of that is. Because it's not going to change if I don't address the root of it.”
“The big humbling part for me was, because I'm a black woman, I figure, ‘there's no way I'm going to be perpetuating any inequities.’ And then I learned some of the discipline practices I had seen growing up or had experienced were actually rooted in a lot of problematic ways of thinking. And I was more of ‘Suppress it!’ kind of thinker. I didn't realize that has long term consequences for children,” she said.
With that awareness of the complex roots and results of teacher-student interactions, these days Brooks pays special attention in her classroom to how she speaks to her students, particularly African American students. At her current elementary school in Oakland, the population of African American students is growing, and yet she is one of only two African American teachers.
She credits her Berkeley’s teacher education with reframing her thinking and extending her work as an educator for equity. “There was a lot of big breaking down of issues, and the Berkeley faculty were very real with me in talking a lot about where our knee-jerk reactions to behavior come from.”
“There are still challenges in how our teachers are receiving kids of color. So it's important for me to model that in many ways, and also be very aware of how I'm regarding different kids in the class, and how other kids see that.”