Ms. G's Secret Sauce: My New Favorite Recipe!

The teacher's guide to Ms. G's Secret Sauce presents each ingredient that help make the recipe for success. These are as follows:
1)Believe in your students;
2)Break down comfort zones;
3)Establish a safe environment;
4)Validate prior knowledge;
5)Motivate your students;
6)Encourage collaboration;
7)Teach tolerance;
8)Promote diversity;
9)Create community;
10)Build bridges;
11)Expect accountability;
12)Celebrate success.
Reading through these I would say that I completely agree with including all of these in the recipe and they each hold a lot of value in the classroom. I feel like I wholly support every one of these, but I especially find myself relating my philosophy most to the first one, believing in your students. I believe that all students can succeed, no matter what their background, SES, race, ethnicity, previous academic background, or anything else. I want to convey this to every student and help them believe in themselves as well. The fifth ingredient was about motivating your students, which is most certainly something that I want to do and I think it is so important in ensuring that the students can be successful too. I want to get to know them and be able to identify what they will be able to relate to or what will encourage them to want to do the work and succeed. As it was aforementioned, I think each of these ingredients are extremely important, but another one that really spoke to my philosophy was the eighth one about promoting diversity. I want all of my students to feel accepted and to embrace their own differences and the uniqueness of one another. I want everyone to feel valued and respected in my classroom, and I want to acknowledge the diversity through my actions and lesson plans.
Overall I appreciated reading about Erin Gruwell's "Secret Sauce," and my philosophy centers on a lot of the ingredients that she also felt were important to ensure success. It was useful for me to not just think about how I want these ingredients in my own classroom someday, but to see that she succeeded at it by reading the excerpts that aligned with each ingredient, as well as the diary entries.