I was 22 years old when I became a teacher. I wish I could say that, from the very beginning, I was a compassionate, fully accomplished educator, but the truth is that in the early years, my performance left much to be desired.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know what I was talking about. In fact, it was quite the opposite: I was able to spend hours talking to my students about how to write a sentence, the importance of identifying the central theme of a story, and reciting to them all the different types of narrators they would encounter.

The problem relied on the methods I used to impart my knowledge.

Since I had been an honor student throughout my school years, I believed that all you had to do to get good grades was to pay attention during class and submit your assignments on time.

However, as years went by, I quickly realized that I could not expect all of my students to do things the same way I had, especially because there is a wide diversity of learning styles and skills in every classroom. As my life and teaching experience increased, I also learned that I had to take into consideration that some of my students were developmentally disabled.

When following protocol doesn’t work