Blog #9: Responding to Students

This past week my teacher for my Emergent Literacy course came to observe me teach an hour-long reading lesson. We had met earlier in the week for a pre-conference where I had told her about what I was going to be doing and given her a copy of the text and graphic organizer my students would be utilizing. During this pre-conference my teacher also asked if there was anything specific I wanted her to be looking for or to take notes on while she was observing me. I thought for a minute and then realized exactly what I wanted feedback on- my responses to my students. When I reflected back on all of the other lessons I had taught, and just my time in my classroom in general, I realized that something I felt I was struggling with was being able to always appropriately respond to students. I felt as if I was having a hard time learning how to work with the answers they were giving me, if they weren’t exactly right or what I wanted. I felt that I was too often giving them the right answers, instead of helping them to get to those right answers for themselves. It may be easier to just give them the right answers and save yourself the frustration, but if you do that, your students aren’t really learning and building knowledge for themselves.

Looking back on my lesson I truly do believe that it went well. My students were engaged throughout the lesson. The text I was teaching with was about Anne Sullivan, who was Helen Keller’s teacher. My students generally really like when we read stories that are biographical and about real people. They always ask so many more questions than the text provides. To start my lesson I showed part of a Brainpop Jr. video about Helen Keller, because I knew that not all of my students would know who she was. This led nicely into giving them the Anne Sullivan text, in which Helen Keller was also discussed. After reading through the text once to model fluency for my students, I called them to the carpet in the room where we do much of our whole-group learning. There I gave them the graphic organizer they would be filling out as we read the text again. The organizer had to do with how Anne, the main character in the story, responded to challenges and what characters traits could then be used to describe her. I had high expectations for how my students would do with this because we have spent a lot of time learning about character traits. There were four different challenges/events listed on the chart and then boxes to fill in the other information. I modelled the completion of the first set of boxes for my students, pointing out that Anne responded to the challenge of being ill by going to see a lot of doctors and how this made her determined and motivated. I then had my students fill out the rest of the chart, using a combination of having them turn and talk and work individually. I made sure that both my CT and I were walking around the carpet and getting down on the floor to talk with students while they were working, and also to nudge them in the right direction if they were stuck or get students who weren’t focused at all back on track.

The lesson went about as smoothly as I could have hoped. Most of my students did meet the expectations I had for them to be able to pick out good character traits to describe Anne. “Helpful” and “determined” were the key ones that I wanted them to be able to identify and some of my students were able to use those exact words without my help. Other students did a wonderful job of coming up with other character traits like “smart,” “kind,” and “brave” that also needed to be included on the chart.

After the lesson was completed I sent the kids back to their desks so my CT could get them started on their writing assignment while I did a post-conference with my Lit teacher. My teacher was able to point out some of the good strategies that I was using to respond to students, and some others that I could utilize more often to make sure that I was reaching all my students. My teacher told me that she thought I was doing a good job validating the answers that my students gave me, and that I wasn’t giving them the answers but instead having other students help them or asking questions that led them to a better answer. She also said how important it was that I was getting down on their level to communicate with them while they were working. She pointed out to me that I did call on some of the same students a lot of the time. I tried to alleviate this some of the time by “pulling clips” (clothespins with their names on them) instead of just calling on raised hands and she said this was something I might try instead doing all the time, to make it more fair and to ensure that all of the students are actively participating.

Overall, I was really glad to hear that, at least for that lesson, I wasn’t doing as poor of a job responding to students as I had thought. I know now that some of the things I’m doing are right and are working and that there are other things I could do to be even better. I want to be a model for my students for communication. I want to interact with them in the best and most positive way I can so that they will interact with both me and with one another in the same way.

Weinstein and Romano (2015) talk about how important it is more students to respond actively in Chapter 9 of their book Elementary Classroom Management: Lessons from Research and Practice (pg. 214). They also discuss that teachers need to be the model for their students, especially when it comes to being motivated to do their work and to learn (Weinstein & Romano, 2015). Teachers need to do things like model enthusiasm for the subject about which the students are learning (Weinstein & Romano, 2015, pg. 214). Teachers, to foster positive relationships between themselves and their students and among the students, have to actually give students the chance to interact with one another (Weinstein & Romano, 2015, pg. 215). They also sometimes need to use “extrinsic rewards” like positive reinforcement and social rewards. This can be as simple as a smile (Weinstein & Romano, 2015, pg. 215).

I think these are other great ideas for how to best communicate with students in the classroom. Upon reflection I can see how I do things mentioned like smiling but I could improve on other aspects like keeping up my enthusiasm for the lesson.

Addresses FEAPS 2 c, e, and f

References

1. Weinstein, C., & Romano, M. (2015). Elementary Classroom Management: Lessons from Research and Practice (6th ed.). New York, New York: McGraw-Hill Education.

#EDE4941 #EDE4504 #FEAPS2C #FEAPS2E #FEAPS2F #weinstein #romano #communication