Pushing Passions Beyond the Classroom

Parker is fortunate to have an extremely dedicated and passionate group of faculty members to lead our students as they develop into empathetic citizens and leaders. This avid approach to teaching is most often visible in their work during the school day; however, faculty members’ passion for education often shows through in their personal work outside the school. Lower School Spanish teacher Valentina Correa and her blog, “Profe Valentina,” is a perfect example of this passion in action.

“Profe Valentina” is an exploration of Correa’s (or Profe Valentina, as her students know her) experience using the communication approach Comprehensible Input to teach her classes. “I wanted to inspire other world language teachers to use a communication approach in their classes,” she shared, “and get rid of the traditional grammar textbooks and conjugations used to teach language. I can see there is a worldwide need in how to implement more methods with the main goal of language acquisition and DEI work.” Seeing a need in the world, Profe Valentina decided to step up and act by sharing her expertise. “I write in Spanish because I didn’t see much information about these topics in Spanish, and I wanted the Latinx community to get more involved with this method.”

While finding enough time to reflect and write about her experiences on her blog may be a challenge, to Profe Valentina the process has been very rewarding. “I have learned how to listen to others,” she elaborated. “It’s nice to see how people can connect with me when they read my articles and how much they benefit from my blog posts. I also noticed that teaching is an evolving career, so sometimes it’s nice to read my old blog posts and see how much I have grown professionally  and the big changes I have made to improve as a teacher and a person.”

Thinking about the future of her blog, Profe Valentina reaffirmed her commitment to helping her fellow teachers bring their curriculum forward. “I want to inspire teachers to be better educators of the world. Lately, I have been focusing on decolonizing my curriculum, and one of my main goals right now is to share that experience with other world language teachers who want to start this work and be better citizens of the world.”

As Parker seeks to work to our mission and educate students to think and act with empathy, courage and clarity as responsible citizens and future leaders in a diverse global society, we are extremely fortunate to have faculty like Profe Valentina, whose dedication to this shared goal is strong—teachers who not only agree with this goal and work throughout the day to achieve it, but spend their free time sharing this message with their peers around the globe.