Blog #3: Knowing Your Students

Emily Johnson
Oct 11, 2015
3 min read

Recently in my classroom management course our instructor did a read-aloud of the book by Jeff Gray and Heather Thomas (2005). This books features black and white photos of a third grade, male student and text of what students have written about what they wish their teachers knew about them. This includes information about their families, like having to take care of a younger sibling or having a parent who is in jail. Also, students talk about how they wish their teacher knew that they like to draw or would have liked to be on the track team but were never told about it. Students also offer up their opinion about how teachers should act and how classrooms should be run, with rules that are few and easy to remember and no yelling. They talk about how much they enjoy spending time with their mentor and how they are trying to resist their friends’ attempts to involve them in gang activity. A major point made by one of the students is that they may not know all about reading and math and science like their teacher does but they know a lot of things that she doesn’t (Gray and Thomas, 2005). They have the streets smarts needed to survive in a harsh environment. All in all, it gives teachers, or future teachers, powerful insights into just how much they can miss if they do not take the time to get to know their students personally.

Being in my internship classroom has been an eye-opening experience as far as learning about my students and the lives they lead. It is a personal goal of mine to never be like the teachers mentioned in . (Gray and Thomas, 2005) I do want to know about my students, not only academically but also about their personal lives and who they truly are. My students are fairly young and typically willing to share freely. I have learned all kinds of information from sharing time during our Morning Meetings. I’ve also learned so much from just the daily conversations and interactions I have with them. It’s amazing what you can hear when you learn how to listen. For example, I know that nearly all my students have multiple younger brothers and sisters. I also know that some of my students only speak English at school, they speak Spanish at home because that’s what their parents speak.

The activity we did in our management class after reading this book was called a “chalk talk.” Our professor wrote the title of the book on the whiteboard and we were responsible for creating the webs that surround it. We could write anything we wanted: quotes from the books, things the book reminded us about, etc. Then if someone wrote something that we had an extending thought about or connection to we would add on.We kept filling in the board until everyone was out of ideas. The trick was that we had to do it without talking.Not talking is not something my classmates and I are particularly great at so I was pleasantly surprised about how well we did making our web. Making the web really allowed us to think about what we’re seeing in our internship classrooms and schools and what we know about our students. It also made us think about how we want to be the kind of teachers that care about our students’ lives and interests.

Sometimes I feel like we get so caught up in our own lives and how busy we are that we forget that we’re doing all of this for our students, both current and future. At the end of the day, they’re the ones that matter. It will take work to make my classroom a place where students feel safe and willing to share about their lives. And it will take work to learn about all the different cultures and academic needs of my students but it is something I fully plan on doing. This connects with what we’ve read about in one of our course textbooks, . (Rothstein-Fisch and Trumball, 2009) A theme that has been recurrent throughout the book is knowing your students and knowing what will work best for them. This plays a role in every aspect of the classroom, from homework to group work to classroom jobs and family involvement (Rothstein-Fisch and Trumball, 2009).

Addresses FEAPS 2 d, f, and h

References

Gray, J. & Thomas, H. (2005). If she only knew me. Kids First Publishing.
Rothstein-Fisch C. & Trumball E. (2009). Managing diverse classrooms: How to build on students cultural strengths. Virginia: ASCD.