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.
