Sangita Satpathy-Lem

"My purpose for having community in the classroom is multi-goaled. One of the goals that I think is so important is that the students are independent learners. Even at eight years old they realize that they have a purpose in learning and that they are in control of their learning and that there all these resources here in this room, but that none of them matter if they don’t want to learn. I feel that I push that from day one. This is their job as a student. We all have goals and that you have to know what your goal is. If you are not an advocate for yourself then no one is going to do it for you. I really want them to take that on."

Video describing Sangita's purpose of community building

Sangita discusses her journey through teaching.

"What has been really inspirational to me is that I have a little girl in my classroom she has been struggling academically, but she has taken this role as a learner in the classroom and I don’t think she sees herself as a struggler anymore. She is known as a leader in the classroom. She is always reading she is always trying and participating. That to me is showing that she is being successful. She sees herself as a learner and that she is in control of this."

"When I first started teaching, I was always looking for behavior management strategies and ways that I could work with small groups, but still manage a classroom. I’d come up with a number of forms and if you need those to make the community work, that’s fine, but as I taught longer, I kept coming back to the idea of what would happen if I weren’t there. After they leave me, what are the things that they are really going to remember and use and so that to me is my definition of authentic learning. What do they carry on after…naturally on their own? When I’m not telling them to work like this or talk like this or to do this, what are the things that they have now internalized and do on their own?

So, the last couple of years, I’ve really tried to (although it makes things harder in the beginning), try to steer away from those external forms of behavioral management like rubrics and those type of things. Now to me, for them to be authentic learners, then they are kind of picking up these natural habits of the mind, I guess you could say. They kind of know that these are things that we do as learners. So I hope that these are things that they’ll do not just this year, but next year and so on and so forth. Things like talking appropriately and respecting people and thinking about multiple perspectives and just all of these life skills that I think are also so important to any community.