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?