summative post

What is my relationship with my students?

            That has been my essential question all throughout this semester. I’ll be their teacher but what else am I to them? Am I their friend? Am I their motivator? Their advisor? I’m not sure any one role makes up a teacher. I think different days call for different things and this semester really helped me understand what my role as teacher is.

            For instance I learned that a teacher is someone who understands what students are going through. I rode that bus every Thursday and every Thursday I was nauseous. What does that mean for my students who come in every morning and can’t handle the ride either? It doesn’t mean I expect less from them or don’t expect them to use the start of their school day for learning. It just means I go about learning differently. I learned through this semester that any limit you create on a person acts like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I tell a student they’re not ready to learn then there is a good chance they’ll believe me.

            Another example of this is when I witnessed students returning from lunch or from the hallways. They were overly hyper and difficult to calm down and focus. Like the bus ride example I think it is important not to limit their educational time. One could easily think “give them five minutes to cool down.” While I don’t necessarily disagree with this I find myself wondering if there isn’t something more I could do.

            I guess what I’ve been thinking about with my question is what does a teacher do? I think with those two examples it is important to establish a community through routine. I think a solution to both those problems might be something like a “check in”, an exercise in which kids take five or so minutes to calm down and get their minds ready for the content at hand. One could have them use their urge to talk as a way to create social structure. One could also give that student who needs a moment to calm down from a bumpy car ride to school an in class writing prompt. Starting the day with something quick, low stakes, and relaxed will give the students a moment to switch into learning mode while also giving them the opportunity to show their learning. If one carefully constructs these start of the day exercises into the fabric of their class then students will already come to expect it.

            I think what I’m getting at is that it’s important not to see teaching just as content. It’s not just about knowing literature it’s about making it accessible to your students. I can know everything there is to know about the English language but if my students don’t understand it then it doesn’t matter. Teaching is about the student, not the teacher. So I think my role as a teacher is to understand them and their needs. I need to understand that they are not just blank canvases ready to learn, they have plenty of things going on in their lives that will detract them from learning. It may be the usual like car (or regular) sickness, or too much energy from lunch or break, but it might also be any number of other things. In a weird and strange world of constant variables I think it is the teacher’s job to figure out how to cut through all of that and create a space where learning can happen. I think routine is important because as I said the world is strange and always changing. If the classroom is the only place that is constant and accessible for them than it is our job to make it so. 

What I want to learn from the parents

I know this blog is late but I didn't feel right not putting one up. I was thinking about how we're going to meet some of the parents of the school and I thought this'll be a great experience. I always hear about parents getting in the way of education (I.e getting books banned, or theories banned, ect) and I think a lot of it boils down to there being no communication. While I certainly don't agree with books being banned I think a parent has the right to have some say in their child's education. What I want to know from these parents is:

What are they looking for in a teacher?
 What could I do as a teacher to make them feel more involved in their child's education?
 What do they think their job as parent is in making sure their student gets the best education they can?
What is the ideal way a teacher and a parent can work together in their mind?

I think the most important thing is to establish a community. A parent that wants to be involved in their child's education shouldn't be seen as a bad thing or something that gets in the way. We are only responsible for the child's learning for a few hours a day. The parent is a great resource in establishing a community that looks at learning as something that happens in and outside of school.

Starting to make progress

So on thursday I mentioned how difficult it was for me to talk to some of the students and connect with them because I felt like it wasn't my place or I didn't know what to say. Unfortunately that observation period I didn't get much opportunity to connect with any of the students as the type of classes I was observing the student's attention needed to be focused on their work and it didn't feel right to distract them from it.

However I went to CF on Monday and observed the period 4 class of Kim (this will be the class I'm going to be teaching) and I felt like I made a lot more progress. They were reading "To kill a mockingbird" and Kim let me sit in with a group. There was a student who Kim admitted was a bit of a troublemaker who didn't like doing his work. I asked him if I could read on with him while the class read aloud together. He said yes and we read together. When I noticed he was getting distracted I made a few gestures to get him back to reading which worked and we didn't have many problems. When we were done and the group had to do their dialectical journals I helped him, and the rest or the group, out with figuring out where everything needed to go. I was shocked that he actually asked me for help with figuring out what to write for the reflection portion. I asked him what he thought it meant, he told me, and then I asked him why he thought that and we were able to come up with a pretty decent reflection for his journal. Lastly I was able to work with the group on their exit slips and when they asked me to help them (the question was something like name 3 things about a particular character in the book) I asked them questions to remind them of things we just read and pushed them to go deeper with the things they were writing about said character. I'm aware that this was only one day and only for a small amount of time but I feel like I made a lot of progress with communicating with the students.

How to differentiate instruction?

So after having that very inspirational discussion with the panel of students I initially felt more inspired to be a teacher than I did before. Who wouldn't want to work with such bright students that have a real passion for learning like they do? I have to wonder though what the students who weren't the leaders of their class would say? I think it's important to understand that there are so many different types of students out there and what worries me is how do I teach them all the way they need to be taught?

One thing I noticed is that all four kids seemed to want four very different things from their teachers and from their assignments. One kid was adamant about getting packets while another was strongly against them. One student liked group work another hated it. So I wonder what does that mean for me as a teacher? How do I appeal to all my students when they all want different things? Do I give packets sometimes and something else another time? Do I give different options for my assignments?

All this tends to overwhelm me. As a teacher candidate my biggest worry is how I'll accommodate all my learners. How can I keep a lesson or activity engaging to everyone while also making sure they all learn?

Extra set of eyes.

So I was thinking all week about what an extra set of eyes did for us as we observed. I'm not sure that was the right question though. I'm thinking it's more along the lines of what did we see as we guided a new pair of eyes? I learned that I'm not as bad at navigating the school, I'm still pretty bad mind you but not as bad as I thought. I think it also livened up the observation a bit. I think once the newness of it wore off a routine started forming. For me I noticed I stopped noticing as much on the walls, and how the classroom was set up and started paying more attention to the teacher and the students. While I don't think this was a bad thing I definitely got the chance to step back and guide my observer a bit which helped me noticing some of the things I stopped looking for.

 This got me thinking about how I always used to think you had to know a lot about what you're teaching in order to teach it. While I still think that's true I also think you learn a lot while teaching. I think there's something to how you focus on something so much when you're teaching and attack it at ever side to gain understanding so that you can share it with your students that makes learning happen so organically. While I wish I could say I learned so much while showing my student around I can say I saw things a lot differently.

Promising Practices

So I'll preface this post by saying this particular experience I had at promising practices is not the one I'll be writing my letter about. Not sure it matters to clarify that but hey there it is.

So during promising practices I learned about something called literacy walks. Basically these are education events where the teacher sets up a variety of stations a student has to walk to and complete a task (usually a fun one) that has something to do with the book or overall theme of the walk. Once they complete one task they move on to the next. The culminating task usually has something to do with the over all point of the book. In this case it was a 3rd grade class reading a book about building things so they built a bridge. This exercise is meant in some way to be just that: exercise. It's supposed to get the students active for a small amount of time and get them out of their seats. While this was designed for an elementary school class I wonder what it would be like with a high school class. 

I'm thinking maybe say American History the student could walk through the path of the original settlers and go through each colony and learn something about each of the original 13 colonies. It could be a great preface to a unit on American History.

Or maybe a preliminary unit on poetry where students walk to different stations learning about different types of poetry and maybe at the end making their own. 

I think this has a lot of promise and I love the idea of adding a kinetic aspect to learning. I think the more parts of the brain and body the student uses to learn the more the student will retain. In this day and age I think it's great to motivate our students to move around more too. 

Do you think you could use this exercise in your class? I'm curious how it might be used in a math class.

My essential question

So I've been thinking about my essential question and I've been thinking about what kind of teacher I want to be. I want to be a teacher that has a good relationship with my students but I've had teachers who tried to be "the cool teacher" and it honestly made me respect them less. I don't want to be the 30 year old who is trying to have a bunch of 16 year old friends. I don't want to be the strict teacher that my students hate either. I remember a teacher I respected a lot who, when I went back to high school to interview him for a class i was taking, said he didn't believe it was his job to help students figure out who they were. He said his job was to teach them English and that's what he'd do. Anything else like aptitude tests, mentoring, and advice he said wasn't his business. I always loved his class when I was in high school and it confused me to hear this. I'm not surprised by this, not many of my teachers could have been considered the 'mentoring type'. I'm not sure that's what I want either but as a kid it would have been nice to have someone to go to about college nad the 'real world' that wouldn't just give me the same basic "go to college" answer that I'm sure most teachers feel obligated to say. I guess one essential question that I'm working around with is: What is my non instructor role as a teacher to my students? What do I owe my students and what line do I want to draw with them? How involved in my students lives do I want to be? This is a question that finds its way in my head a lot. I often wonder not only what kind of teacher do I want to be but what kind of teacher I'll end up being. I think what I want and what I find out works best for me might end up being too different things. After all I know so little about who I am as a teacher.