A learning experience

Just as educating children or operating a school requires the partnership of many individuals and organizations, the success of Jumpstart is also dependent on the work of communities. These communities not only enable session planning and implementation to be more successful, but they also allow our time in the classroom to be more individualized for every student. This past semester, our team discovered that a focus on collaboration and partnership made sessions more engaging, materials of higher-quality, and a greater feeling of confidence in our work. And, from this growth we began to value the craziness and excitement embodied in every session, students’ smiles that exemplify hope and curiosity, and moments that illustrate students’ social and academic growth.

Jumpstart’s value on teamwork and collaboration is evident in its design of teams of corps members implementing session rather than a single educator for every classroom. From this, every session plan activity allows children to connect with corps members on a more individual level in order to better meet the social, emotional, and academic needs of every student. Similarly, a lower ratio also enables us to better understand our children and get to know them as students and individuals.

Additionally, by working as a team, we are able to use our past experiences and training to create solutions that address instructional and classroom management challenges. As evident during our team planning meeting, the solutions that we devised were diverse, which allowed them to be more successful as the needs of our students are also diverse.

Every session at Jumpstart is a learning experience for me as much as our children. I learn new instructional and classroom management strategies, how to partner with my peers, and how lucky I am to have the opportunity to work with Jumpstart again. Every week, I appreciate the community of support that Jumpstart provides both in and out of the classroom in order to ensure the success of us corps members and the students that we work with.

~Grant Conway

Team Leader

Team Joy