Monday, June 25, 2007

My Performance as a Teacher

As a teacher, summer school was a major point of reflection. It was a chance to redo all the things I wish I had done better last year. I got a new first day of school. I got a new chance to be consistent on the first day and every day thereafter. I got a new chance to interact with the students in a way that I felt more comfortable.

I was going to be humble but I am just going to say it: my class is reeking of success. The very small environment and the abundance of capable teachers makes it work surprisingly well. My partner and I got control of the class early and created a very strong work ethic. The kids are responding and working hard.

The main areas we honed in on instructionally were the parts of speech (with an emphasis on verb usage). We (particularly the other second year and myself) worked on it early and often. Additionally, the experience we as second-years was reflected in the instruction. We had a ton of resources available and knew what the students needed to know. We also had this seriousness about us that forced the kids to do their work. On the test we gave, the students seem to have picked up things they didn’t know. There is already progress since the pre-test. Whoo!

The area where they were weakest was sentence structure. It is kind of this ambiguous entity. I mainly worked with the rules of subject-verb agreement. It is necessary to give them the rules to frame so many other lessons (particularly simple and compound sentences) that illustrate them in effect. The weakness was the approach. I have yet to figure out the right way to teach all this stuff. All of the content I am teaching relies on other content I am teaching and it is hard to figure out what should go first. Talking about how subjects and verbs agree in statements with phrase is slightly confusing if we haven’t gone over phrases yet. At the same time it would be silly to go over phrases without having fully covered the more basic parts of the sentence, the subject and verb, I never really realized how complex English is until I attempted to teach it.

Procedurally, the instruction was strong. The students were listening and working hard. The assessments that have been given look pretty good. There are a few problems here and there, but nothing that indicates that they aren’t “getting it”. I was lucky enough to be in a classroom environment where I have the luxury of working with other teachers that have different perspectives about the problems that the class is experiencing and the gains that the class is making. With five kids, it is VERY EASY to differentiate instruction. I can simply hand out five different sheets that are suited to the student’s problems. I can pull a kid out while another teacher is providing instruction. It is amazing.

In the future I want to focus more on delivering a cohesive educational product to my students. I want them to engage more with the content. Way too many lessons were teacher-centered and required very little of the students other than to learn and practice proper grammar. The very nature of summer school required us to move from item to item whether or not the students understood the topic fully. If I were doing this again, I would find a way to work on those aspects and make the class a more polished product.

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