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Almost Here

As I walked into the classroom the first thing I noticed was the classroom structure. The desks were in rows, the Smartboard embedded between two white boards and a large bookshelf that encased most of the wall was in the front. After discussing the classroom structure with my CT later on, she told me that she liked this set up because she usually lectured so she was the focal point of the classroom. This made me think about my own pedagogy and upcoming lesson. I assumed that the students were used to a lecture based teacher centered class. In my own pedagogy, I believe that all students deserve the right to have a voice, a choice and a community. For the educator, this means providing the space, initiating critical exploratory questions, and facilitating activities. The students should be able to doubt and ask questions, because doubting is a part of learning. A teacher centered classroom may not provide this opportunity for students.

For my lesson I taught at Bloomington High School I incorporated two different student centered interactive activities the revolved around prefixes. After I presented these to my CT she told me that her seventh hour was her most active class and that sometimes she had trouble keeping them on task. I, somewhat hesitantly, decided to keep my initial plans for the lesson. The following week I was a bit fearful going into the lesson, but it worked out beautifully. The students were engaged, they seemed to be having fun, and they were learning. This made me think about my own personal philosophy of teaching, especially as a beginning teacher. I am sure I am going to have plenty of moments of apprehensiveness and fear but providing students the space to create their own learning is essential. I think there has to be an established trust in a classroom and the only way to establish this is to trust your students and let them trust you.

The first part of the lesson I gave a quick presentation on the importance of knowing prefixes, and then I split the class into two sides; one side had note cards with prefixes, and the other with root words. They had a handout in front of them and had to cross pollinate to create words, create a definition, and provide a context for the word. The next activity was the flyswatter game. Prefixes were on sticky notes on the board as a member of their group had to come up and swat the appropriate prefix to the definition. I remember at one point they were all fairly loud, but they were just cheering on their team and trying to provide support for their swatter.

The interactions that commanded most of my attention most were when students were excited when the content related to their daily lives. For example, when reading The Odyssey the teacher asked what they thought about Penelope waiting all that time for Odysseus while he was out on his adventure. I was glad to see the reaction from the students. Many hands shot up in rebuke, eager to voice their opinion about this topic. Asking challenging questions that are relevant to the ‘here and now’ in the classroom is something that I hope to incorporate into every lesson in the future.

  On the other hand, there were some moments that I could tell the students left the classroom drained, unmotivated, and un-engaged. Unfortunately, it was with one of the reading classes I was in. To practice reading processes, skills and strategies three days a week the six students walked in the door, grabbed a laptop and began doing activities with the program Reading Plus such to read for comprehension, speed reading and identifying main ideas in the provided text. I had the opportunity to have a few interventions with students about where they were not performing well in the program. One conversation I had with a student stuck with me the most. He seemed resistant at first, maybe embarrassed. He struggled with identifying main idea of the online texts. Something that I thought about at this moment was something we have been talking about in class; reading through lenses. Instead of the students reading with no goal, nothing that they should be reading for, they could have put on one of the many lenses to read the text. This is something that I am going to use in my future classes.

The student and I reviewed some different strategies he could use in order to better identify main idea. After all was said and done, I asked him if he liked the program. He looked at me and said, “No, it makes me tired.” Of course it does, these students were staring at a computer screen for 50 minutes straight. He liked to read sports texts, mainly about football. As we talked about in class this semester, motivation is the key to nurturing a life long reader. I think space to develop metacognitive skills would have also helped students develop their reading process, skills and strategies. Also, as Kittle has said, “Nothing without joy”. I fully invest in this statement to provide the students with encouragement and challenge them in their reading.

Being an educator means that we take on the responsibility and challenge of staying up to date with best practices. More specifically, this means that being a reflective and reflexive educator. As I like to see it (and as it is promoted in my TESOL classes) becoming a researcher in my own classrooms and staying up to date on theory and research that is happening beyond the walls of the classroom is an attribute of best practice. As a future educator, I believe it is my responsibility to staying current with the best practices. I intend on doing this through conferences, professional development, creating a well versed teaching community, and through individual endeavors of research.  My CT is getting her Masters degree in reading right now to better herself and her students. I hope to never stop learning and challenging myself in the future. At the beginning of each school year, I think I will set professional goals for myself to work on throughout the semester or year. One thing that I have seen a few times in teachers is the resistance to change their practices. I often hear things such as, “I know what works, I have been doing this for -insert large number- years!” But we need to remember that we are here to better our students, to lead them into developing a love for learning, and to give them the tools they can use outside of the classroom to look at the world critically and empathetically. I really enjoyed being apart of the Bloomington High School classes. This experience also made me solidify what kind of school I would like to teach at in the future. 

What Makes Good Teaching?

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see"(Henry David Thoreau

Once Upon A Time (Gordimer): Facing our Fears of the Unknown 3rd Space

In my classroom this week I decided to take note to how my mentor teacher created third space, or the fusing of primary and secondary spaces. In other words,  bridging the gap between school environments and social environments. There are many uncovered questions that educators have to face to unhinge the self produced iron bars of the classroom. There may be safety there, however to create a natural learning environment for students, one must learn how to both incorporate secondary spaces in the classroom, and primary spaces outside the classroom. 

This is often much easier said then done. But, to make memorable learning experiences that are useful and relevant to students everyday lives is vital to impressionable and continual learning. 

I am disappointed to report that I did not see any third spaces in my experiences these last two weeks. The two classes I observed were practicing grammar skills. They had packets that had questions similar to those on the ACT. There has to be a way to make this content more relevant to students lives either through an activity, or creating secondary contexts. 

There are a lot of football players in this class. So, I was thinking of creating a game that incorporated the rules of  football, and grammar. This would make it more relevant to the students and...it may just be fun. 

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The Lottery: Reconsidering Old Ways of Thinking

                                                                         

 I stood outside the closed classroom door having small talk with the students as I waited for the teacher. The bell for class to start rang as I found myself standing in front the curious students. The teacher introduced me as a series of questions started to quick fire in my direction. "How tall are you?" "Where are you from?" etc. The teacher prompt students to grab their computers and get to work on their assignment for the day. The assignment that they did three other days a week also. It is called Reading Plus. It is a web program that serves "...students in grades 3 and up that transforms how, what, and why students read while broadening interests and building knowledge" (Readingplus). The students sat silently as I spoke to my mentor teacher about the preliminaries, future meeting times, what she does throughout her day and, yes, this program. Now, I know that this experience is teacher focused, but I don't think I can help but write about this. 

     The students sat in front of their screens for approximately 45 minutes. They worked on reading comprehension, speed reading and decoding. By the end of the 45 minutes all of the students were silent. Burnt out. Not having fun. How can real learning happen if there if the brain is not being fully activated through fun? So, in class this week we went through some techniques in how to connect and activate students minds. I would like to apply a few of these and offer some situations that they can be utilized. 

Comprehension and Speed Reading through Quick Sketches: 

Students will first read an article in their Upfront (NYTimes) of their choosing. They will then sketch what that article is about. In groups of three, students will swap sketches and speed read through articles to figure out which article the sketcher is communicating.  

     This is just an idea that has not been put into practice, but I just feel very disheartened that those students have to practice these skills through this process. It will not make them motivated to pursuing life long reading. Hopefully something like this can be later incorporated in this classroom, or my future classroom. 
     I was at Bloomington High School for three class periods the first day, and my mentors planning period the following day. I was able to see how she prepared for classes, grade some assignments, and gain some insight into how the logistics of how the High School worked. This included submitting forms to get some new books, getting a call at the last second because a substitute teacher did not show up, and taking time to prep for the following period.