The above quote, from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, encapsulates my feelings about how teaching and learning happens. Students must discover their own road. Our primary task as educators must then be to create a nourishing, encouraging environment wherein, through the process of critical inquiry and discovery, they feel safe and confident enough to find and walk that road.

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In my own journey as a life-long learner, I have spent a great deal of time exploring this idea of guiding, rather than instructing. Most recently, I have had the opportunity to explore this idea by participating in training courses to hone my skills as a teacher of the Contemporary First Nations, Metis & Inuit Voices in Canada course. Through earning my Google Certified Educator and Microsoft Innovative Educator certificates, I have learned strategies to implement digitally augmented systems that encourage student choice and voice. While working towards my Honours Specialist in Music, as well as working closely with my colleagues in the OCDSB All-Star Band Steering Committee, I have had the opportunity to hear the insights of other like-minded teachers working towards these same goals. I have not yet come to a place in my own teaching where everything - or nearly everything, at least - is student-driven but, through reflection, self-directed education and feedback from others, I move a little closer to attaining this goal with each passing year.

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The final stanza of Machado's poem goes like this: "Traveller, there is no road; only a ship's wake on the sea". A teacher's responsibility is to help their students find and walk their own road but also to help them manage their wake, so to speak. More than ever before, we must help our students understand that every choice they make will have consequences, both positive and negative; we must provide them with the tools to navigate the sea of information, emotion, challenge and endless possibility that they face.