Blackwell Blog #2

Blackwell Blog Dos

As always, with teaching comes a considerable amount of learning. This was especially true during the past few weeks of summer school, as I began to see all of my flaws (and some of my strengths) exhibited by the first years I had been observing in our classroom. It was not without a dose of hypocrisy that I would sit down after a lesson they taught on Subject-Verb Agreement or Figurative Language and go over what I feel they should do differently; much of it is the very same critiques that I’ve received from others and am constantly giving to myself. Speak clearly and be consistent. Slow down, check for understanding, keep everyone involved and relax. Vary the presentation of material, be energized if you want your students to be as well, always have something for them to be doing and not just listening. So, in their mistakes – natural being the first time some of them have ever gotten in front of a classroom – I see my own tendencies and in my efforts to correct their delivery I am also reminding myself that these are all things I should be working on as well.

As far as my own performance is concerned (and it is a performance, isn’t it – I always have felt like I was impersonating a teacher as much as any other role I’ve ever assumed), I feel stronger, more confident and much better adapted to the climate of your average classroom than I was at this time last year. Running the gauntlet this past year has bruised my body some, but I’ve come out a much better teacher and I believe a better person. Where it took my months to break through to my students last fall, it only took days this summer. Where it would take hours upon hours to lesson plan last summer, it rarely takes more than an hour now. Now, this will be different come next fall when I am lesson planning for an entirely new curriculum, but I am sure the skills and techniques I’ve acquired will translate quite a bit.

Most of my lessons, and our lessons as a group, have been successful this summer largely due to the supportive environment of our summer school program but also because of the energy and enthusiasm of our students. They want to learn, listen and participate. Granted, we lead and they follow, but they are heading in the right direction all the same. More so than usual, I’ve found discussion and group interactivity more successful than anything else this summer – perhaps the nature of the beast of forcing children to attend school during what is traditionally their months off from school. Least successful is easy, independent work. That is why most of them are here to begin with. Whether it’s due to low reading comprehension skills or lack of background knowledge, they lose focus, motivation and understanding when they are left to figure something out entirely on their own. This, however, is getting better.

To go along with learning goals, our instructional procedures and policies have worked very well also. Again, the credit for this cannot be taken entirely, if at all, by us – but instead must be attributed to the supportive and well-oiled summer school administration. It is so great to feel respected, and again, supported. To have school policies that make sense, are explained, and are backed up. With a year under my belt, I have a much better idea of what works and what doesn’t, without having to take someone else’s word for it. This eliminates so many problems and issues that I had to deal with last year daily.

Finally, differentiation is one of my biggest foci, but also my greatest challenges, in the classroom. How do you teach to twenty children all on extremely different levels of learning. How do you keep this one from getting bored, or this one from getting lost? It’s much easier with four teachers, and we’ve started to pull students out of the room one at a time to give them individualized instruction on what they are not grasping or need the most work on. This is based on test scores, writing samples, and their ability to read aloud and comprehend. For some of our kids, this is a brief check on how they are doing and review of their weaknesses. For others, we take almost ten minutes to slowly review what it is they are not clear on, or to have them read aloud to us. This is about as individualized as you can get, and as far as pure differentiation, both myself and the other three teachers in our classroom continue to strive to bring in varied styles and activities to engage as many of our students as we can as often as possible.