Educators value the success of all students and act in their best interests.
This standard means that every student needs and deserves to be treated fairly and have their voice heard. It would be convenient for a teacher to play favourites and make the experience of most of the students more convenient at the cost of a minority of them, but it would not be good. I have an instance where I saw this standard in practice and participated in ensuring all students had their voices heard.
Vanway had an incident while I was supervising after school on Friday which showed a perfect situation where I could display an understanding of Standard 1. The incident as I saw it was as follows. There was a group of students and another one ran past a group, shouting something. Because of that the other students started to chase the lone runner. One of the chasers threw a rock. Then my CT who worked for a time in Harlem got to work. She was extremely efficient and immediately got all the students to stop so she was able to stop the incident and make sure that the students were aware that the behaviour was entirely unacceptable and the target of the group was safe.
This was stressful to one of the students who walked and then ran away from the group. I followed the student and ended up on the other side of the fence of them. I asked them to return since it would be better for them if they were able to advocate for themselves. They did not want to so I asked them for their side of the story.
This student had lost a water bottle today and wanted to find it. The target of the incident ran past the group and said that they had stolen the bottle, which was a lie. The bottle-less student did not throw the rock and afraid that they would be scapegoated as the ‘ringleader’ since they and the target had some history of conflicts. They consistently got pestered by the “not bottle thief” and consequences were doled out only when there was a response to the pestering.
In the end I was unable to convince them to return by the time the friends who were involved got him and left. I brought back their story to be included in the incident report. Conferring with the other teachers who saw or were involved in the incident I brought the student’s perspective to the group. The teachers were obviously not going to scapegoat the student so even if I had not been there that afternoon I am sure it would have been fine, though the perspective was conveyed to the student’s teacher and helped give some insight.
If you don’t know how a student feels, which is particularly easy if the student has a preconceived idea of your response and chooses not to ask because of it. So a teacher should be particularly open to the perspectives of coworkers and other outsiders since they can show the perspective of a student who has grown to show a defeatist mindset, since all students deserve to be heard even if they are unwilling to speak.