Summative Reflection

A Bittersweet Finale

            With SED 407 coming to a close I have to say that I feel like a teacher. Actually, I do not simply feel like a teacher, I am a teacher. This class was unlike anything I had ever experienced before, and I am very grateful to have gotten the chance to experience being in and out of classrooms once a week and working closely with real life teachers and administrators. Before I had started this semester I was extremely nervous about inserting myself into a classroom full of living and breathing students and getting them to listen to me as I explained concepts, vocabulary, analysis techniques, and organizational techniques in regards to English Literature. And now that it is all done, I am ready to do it again and again.

            Throughout this course I had learned many different and new ideas that I plan on keeping in mind whenever planning a lesson or assigning any type of task. The first is that confidence is one of the most important things for teachers to both have and develop in their students. When I stand in front of a class I need to show students that I know what I am doing and why I am doing it, while showing them that I am not afraid to admit that I may need to draw charts and outline ideas in order to fully understand them, and that it is okay to use a dictionary to look up words that I don’t know. If I am willing to take risks with trying to figure out new ideas and develop them, then students will feel it is okay to take risks too. I need to show them that not understanding something or knowing something is not a failure, but rather a learning experience.

A second learning I experienced was that learning inside the school needs to connect with student experience outside of school. School is only six hours a day. That means that there are 18 hours a day that students are not inside the building. If lessons are only taught to apply to schoolwork, then what is the point of learning them, especially when students will graduate from school, and not all students plan to go to college. Themes in literature and the emotions of characters need to be connected to students’ experiences outside of the box that is the school building.

This whole idea of connecting learning in school to experience outside of school relates directly to another thing that I learned, and that is the power of why. I have grown to believe that students should be told why a certain lesson is important, and that answer is never just that it is part of the curriculum. Students should know why things are important, it isn’t being taught to them because of the curriculum, it is being taught so they can apply the learning to their everyday life, whether it is to navigate through a new situation where critical thinking is required, or to express themselves better to employers and colleagues.

Now that I have outlined my most important learnings for the course, I want to discuss my most valuable learning experiences. My first has to deal with planning lessons. While it was hard to jump into the middle of a unit and teach two lessons, I managed to pull it off and create two lessons that fit perfectly into the unit that the teacher created. But the realization I came to while I was trying to figure out how I wanted to present the new information to students was that not every lesson needs a big elaborate exercise where students work collaboratively. While planning my lessons I kept coming up with activities that seemed fun but did not necessarily fit the concepts and themes I was trying to get students to uncover by analyzing the text. So I used backwards design to examine my objectives, and I found some not so elaborate whole class activities that would drive home the points I was trying to make while connecting it to the students own experiences and not abandoning the teachings of the teacher’s unit.

The second learning experience was the conversation we had with one of the staff at the school who told us that as teachers we need to constantly be studying students, keeping data, and peeling back the layers of onion that are the students. While knowing that keeping track of students was a valuable tool, I had never looked at it like an onion and that there are often many layers that need to be seen through in order to get the student to really open up to us, and there is no way a student will learn from someone that they do not trust.

The third learning experience that impacted me came from the vice principal who told us to remember that every day is a new day. This is something that I have practiced for many years working with after school programs but I was never able to put into words. Sometimes children do not know how to properly express how they feel and lash out instead. We as teachers need to look past the surface of the misbehavior to figure out why students are behaving this way, and never hold it against them. Every day is a new day has become something I tell myself every night and every morning.

This semester has been full of so many rich experiences that these are only a few of them. Every day seemed to present a highlight that I have told all of my friends and family about. If I were to list any disappointments, I would say that I would have wanted to spend even more time in the high school, and more time directly with the students, asking them about their thought processes when learning new things. I feel like I have taken a giant step forward in creating my teacher identity, and I often catch myself looking at everything from a perspective of curiosity of how I could use it in my classroom. I am looking forward to practicum next semester and developing my teacher identity further.

EMBRACE DISCOMFORT

In life we are constantly being shoved into uncomfortable situations and we immediately run for the nearest shade of comfort that we can find, and we bask in the warmth of its womb-like familiarity. What if I told you that you were doing it wrong. For many of us, this will be our first time standing in front of a class full of teenaged students, teaching our lessons that we so elegantly scribbled with our own blood. Uncomfortable? You bet. But I have recently come upon a new saying that I have been constantly reminding myself of, “Embrace discomfort if you want to get better”. Yes, I’m saying that we need to accept our nervousness and give it a great big hug.

The quote comes from this article, written by Henriette Lazaridis Power, which has become something I have read 4 times in the past week. To sum it up, Power says that we need to stop making excuses as to why we don’t put all our effort into one thing, because when it boils down, we are too scared to fail. To connect it to our own learning, don’t we constantly say that learning takes place when students take risks. Well how are we going to get any better at teaching or lesson planning if we don’t just jump in with guns blazing. I know personally when I think back to this saying of embrace discomfort, I feel inspired to put everything I have into whatever I’m working on, because how can I expect my students to take risks if I’m unwilling to.

EFFORT AND GRADE

Something that I am constantly thinking about is what motivates students to succeed and what has motivated me to succeed and the single word that everything goes back to is grades. Do I want my students to be motivated by grades, or by learning? I say learning. And while no student may be motivated to do something if you tell them they will learn, you can motivate them by praising their effort instead of their grades, because the only way to learn anything is to work at it, which involves effort.

To relate this to myself, when I was in the 7^th grade I realized that I was putting twice as much effort into assignments than my peers did, yet I was getting the same grades of A. No one ever said great effort, it was always great grade. So naturally I started to slack off, and I graduated high school 12^th in my class of over 200 and even had some college credits. I was motivated in school to get good grades, not learn, and I couldn’t tell you much about anything I did to get those grades.

As teachers, we will get to know our students and what they are capable of. I don’t want students like me that have no motivation to try because what they do is good enough for a great grade, I want students to try because they want to prove they are the best and can do incredible things. I think instead of saying good grade and bad grade, we should say good work, but I know you can do better, I want you to give your best effort. If I had a teacher that told me my grade was the highest in the class, but they were disappointed because they knew I could have done more and tried harder, I would have. I assume recognizing effort and the amount put into assignments would also inspire students who may try their hardest and fall short. Praising their effort will inspire them to continue to try and succeed. Focusing on their C after they tried so hard may simply make them feel like they can’t do better, and this is something no one wants. We need to make sure we praise best effort, not good grades.

Motivate

Yesterday we got the chance to discuss teachers and education with four of the students from district C, and something that I couldn’t help but notice was that all four of these students we student leader and extremely self-motivated. I was a self-motivated person and was in all A.P. classes, so these are students that I can relate to very well. And while hearing these students discuss what they like and what motivates them I felt like I was hearing myself. This is a little scary because that is just one type of student.

I spent most of the panel time thinking of how a non-self-motivated student would answer these questions. I hate admitting this, but the more than a hundred children I work with everyday consist of only a handful of self-motivated students. The rest do their school work because they want go to the next grade and don’t want detention. One of the students discussed feeling that students wanted them to fail first so they can build on top of failures, and they felt like risks were okay. I don’t see that in many of the students I help with homework, but I try to develop that.

So often I see children not wanting to attempt things because they feel they will do it wrong, and what is the purpose of putting in effort if you will get it wrong. I am starting to think that one of the most important things in a classroom is trying, and learning from failure, something that seems to be missing from a lot of classrooms. This could include multiple drafts to be examined by the teacher or maybe a practice test where the teacher can go over every problem to make sure students can pin point the areas where they need help and then the teacher can help them before the final exam. I personally cannot remember multiple drafts in high school, and this definitely puts a stress on students which can sometimes cause students to completely shut down.

Motivation seems to be absent in many students, so how will you help motivate your students to put in the work needed to succeed.

On Modelling

When speaking on teaching strategies, the word modelling gets tossed around a lot. The type of modelling that is often spoken on though is probably not the most correct way of modelling. Chapter 8 of William Strong’s Coaching Writing in Content Areas discusses modelling writing as showing students a few examples of work, looking at the errors and showing students what type of work would get which type of grade. This is not necessarily the only way to model writing because it still keeps writing a little mystified.

Truth is, good writing doesn’t just happen. It is something that needs to be developed and edited. Students will see finished work and think “I can never write that good, why should I even try”. I think the real way modelling should be used is to demystify good writing. In order to do this, a teacher should write with students, and in front of students, illustrating the thought process and how to work through errors. If a teacher’s first draft is sloppy, students will know that they can have sloppy drafts too, allowing them to take risks, and we all know learning happens when risks are taken.

Now modelling like this, or rather modelling “thought” isn’t just a technique that could be useful for writing. In one of my classes last week we did an exercise where we wrote about our thought process while reading through a poem as a class 3 times. The change of focus from one reading to another showed our techniques of decoding poems to ourselves. Showing this side to students is definitely a way of modelling. Most students don’t “get” poetry, but they probably only will read the poem once, I don’t get poems after the first read, so why would they, and why should I act like I can? Modelling thought process could also be used for math problems, or maybe working your way through a primary document. Modelling should be used as a technique to show that no one is perfect, and everything takes work.

Here’s some types of modelling: http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/4697

Fighting a Hidden Curriculum

Chapter 2 in our book written by Daniel Strong touches upon the “hidden curriculum”, something that I myself am a victim of. I use the word victim because it has caused me to often times believe that learning is about a grade and not being about learning. Learning is about practice, experience, and risk. The risk part of learning is where I feel learning is wounded in our educational practices. The risk isn’t trying something new or expanding on ideas, the risk is passing the class.

With the risk of school work being on making the grade, how can we really make students explore their learning and make it their own? In high school, I could be handed an assignment sheet on comparing a common motif between two novels in four pages, with a clear rubric, and I could do it in a matter of 3 hours and hit all the main points. At the least, I would say that paper would get a B+/ A-, but I couldn’t really tell you about what I wrote about, or what I learned 3 months later.

I don’t think this grade is proof of learning. And I think that it may be because this assignment is fake. I say it is fake because there is no connection to the student. Assignments like this have students regurgitating the ideas that are being passed around in class. There is no real room for personal opinion, or real world connections.

So now I am curious as to how we can eliminate this hidden curriculum of school being about grades, and make it about learning. Some ideas that I have already began playing with are giving real world assignments. Instead of just assigning something where you say pretend we are writing this to the local paper, actually write it to the paper. Connecting lessons to current events, make school about the outside world we are preparing them for. And of course the 5 minute break down at the end of class, where what was learned that day is addressed and the importance of it is uncovered. What are some ideas that you may have to make school about learning and not about grades?

On a side note, I type into google, why do we study literature, and I got this dry, boring reply: http://www.ask.com/question/why-do-we-study-literature. As a high school student asking this question, I would have replied, “why does any of that matter in life?” I’m beginning to think that school and “real life” are two different things and that there needs to be a bridge over that gap connecting the two.

Managing Behavior

Controlling all the children in your class is not something that one teacher can do easily, instead a teacher needs to coach the students to control their own behavior inside of the classroom. This is something that I feel Metzger stresses in her letter. In my own experiences I have learned that solid rules and clear consequences for not following rules are the best combatant for undesirable behavior. And of course the consequences need to be followed through upon. If anyone working with children gives clear rules and regularly goes over the rules, the children will be able to recite them and will police themselves.

            With solid rules and consequences, I have noticed that it is a lot easier to deal with those that may not follow the rules and need be redirected. The vice principal at District C told us that he never says he is mad but rather that he is disappointed. The children I work with do not ever want to upset the staff members and often act on emotion without thinking through their actions. When this happens I find the best method is to isolate students and explain why their behavior is less than acceptable. The first question I start with is “why?”. Often this is met with an answer that they don’t know so I break down everything that happened and we figure out where bad decisions were made, why, and the correct approach. Then I normally express how their behavior makes me feel, and when they understand that the behavior effects everyone negatively, they think a little bit more before acting.

 

            The most important thing I feel is that you should not get into a power struggle with a student. The most important thing to remember is that you are the teacher and have the ultimate power. Children will try to drag you down to their level. A teacher needs to diffuse situations instead of heightening them, and that is something that Metzger mentions in her letter. But the most important thing to control classrooms, or any groups of children, is to have a plan and solid rules and consequences. A cool site for classroom management ideas is this one: https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos?landing_page=Classroom+Culture+Behavior+Landing+Page&gclid=COy0qaDotboCFU9o7AodI0cAfg