My first instinct when reading this prompt was to relate it to my experience as a student teacher last year in high school, but first I think it’s important for me to realize the ways that I’ve been met where I was. What comes to mind immediately is my experience overcoming my fear of staying home alone. When I was younger, I had a pretty paralyzing fear of being home alone. My parents had very different methods of approaching this fear, though: my mom preferred to push me head first into the deep end to meet her schedule needs, while my dad waited patiently until I had just enough courage to take on five minutes, then thirty, then an hour. Looking back, my mom’s approach did nothing but create more anxiety. In addition to my own fear, her ways created embarrassment and guilt. While my dad still nudged me to try, he took the time to consider my perspective and past experiences in order to find a way forward that best served me.
In my brief glimpse into the teaching world as a fifth grade intern last fall, I came to understand that teaching curriculum comes with a strict timeline. Teachers have limited time to present and review content before inevitably having to evaluate kids’ understanding with tests. I watched my cooperating teacher weigh taking an extra day to prepare the kids with the looming pressure of upcoming district and state assessments. When I consider both the way that I was met and the way that my cooperating teacher met her students, I come up with this practical, working definition of “meeting someone where they are” in education.
To meet someone where they are is to A) consider the background behind their abilities and B) make a practical plan forward with those abilities as a starting point.
Part A comes from “where they are” and part B is the “meeting them” part.
You can’t, like my mom did, assume an even playing field. Just because I was 11 did not mean that I had the same confidence staying home alone as one other 11 year old, or even most other 11 year olds. My dad, however, paused to assess- despite his own frustrations (because the right thing isn’t always the easy thing). Succinctly, I believe meeting someone where they are is not achieved by simply acknowledging “where someone is,” or the factors that make them present a certain way. Knowing that a kid has a high need sibling at home and requires extra validation at school isn’t enough… It requires action. It requires a teacher to make sure that student is heard in discussion, for example. My dad and I taped a home alone schedule of sorts to the fridge that I helped design to reach that confidence threshold necessary for success. That is meeting someone where they are.
