The goal I set for myself this semester was to gain more
experience with diverse learners and more specifically with students who are
considered ELL or ESL. I wrote this goal because I want to work in an urban
setting in my future and I know that working in an urban setting is going to
bring a very diverse group of learners and I want to gain as much educational
experience with diverse learners so I have some preparation under my belt. I
know that as teachers we tend to teach the way we were taught and I want to
make sure I am taught now how to work with students who are different from me
and my background so that I can help those students reach their own personal
excellence in the future. Last Thursday at Brigham, was a new experience for me
because I have not really taught in a classroom yet that has students that can
speak multiple languages. The classroom had a large array of materials that
were in dual languages. I think it is going to be difficult and certainly
challenging for us to teach science lessons to students of dual languages as
well as students whom we don't know very well but I am up for the challenge. I
want to give the teachers in kindergarten last week a shout-out because I
thought we all did an awesome job in that classroom. We all were pretty
confused about what was going to happen and how to really carry through with
this lesson when we didn't really know our students or much about the school.
Somehow though, we were all able to feed off of each other and really help each
other to pull off a fairly seamless lesson. The students were all engaged in
the lesson and were generally excited to have us in their classroom. I think
the teacher also enjoyed seeing how we were interacting with the kids in the
classroom. I wish I would have had more time to plan out the game that we were
playing in the classroom and that I had known the students more so I could’ve
made rules more explicit based on their reactions to regular classroom lessons.
I think this really helps when you know the students because only someone who
is familiar with the children will really know what the kids need to hear to
give an activity. But we did our best to repair any damaging behavior along the
way and it was nice to know that I was not alone in the classroom and I could
rely on the other teachers in the classroom to help me reinforce the rules. One
of my favorite quotes is pictured below. It really reaches me right now because
it always strikes me how much I am actually learning from the kids in the
classroom and from the surrounding teachers too. It makes me happy that I will
never be done learning and that I will strive to challenge my students as much
as they challenge me and we will come out better for it. I know that I will be
able to look back on these experiences at Brigham and use them as a reference
for future teaching and it will help me know what may or may not work for a
specific group of students.
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Exceeds: I went over the word limit and talked about my future goals. As well as incorporating a quote and picture.
Annie,
ReplyDeleteI liked reading your post, and I agree with almost everything you said. I think the teacher’s who working in kindergarten with us, all did a very good job. I would agree that it was extremely difficult to walk into a classroom, where the children have no idea who you are, and teach a lesson. It’s also really hard to plan a lesson for those students whom you don’t know anything about. It kind of goes against everything we’ve learned at ISU about adapting and planning for your specific students. I think the lesson went O.K. although it probably could’ve been better if we’d had more time to actually plan and discuss what everyone was going to do.
It’s interesting to me that you pointed out how you want to teach in an urban school. I think the interactions with these children will most certainly give you some experience in working with students who speak different languages. I plan on moving to Texas after I’m done with school, so this time in a dual language classroom will also help me. It’ll be particularly helpful, because we’re working with Spanish and English speaking students, and those are the probably the two most prominent languages I’m going to encounter in Texas. I also really liked how the teacher had things labeled in Spanish and English for the children. However, I’m surprised that we didn’t’ hear (or at least I didn’t hear) any of the children speak Spanish while we were in the classroom.