Statement of Prospect
Part I - Teacher in Progress
Throughout my teaching thus far I am coming to realize some of my strengths and weaknesses. I feel quite confident in my ability to make learning engaging, meaningful and memorable. There is no limit to what I'll try in order to create an active, fun and meaningful learning experience for students. This includes acting silly while teaching in my socks, dramatizing a concept in front of them as if teaching is a performance, demanding they get out of their seats and use their bodies as learning tools, using variety of means to bring their own lives and experiences into what we are learning and much more.
However, sometimes my desire to have a positive and affective learning experience can result in some disorganization, classroom management issues and most significantly a feeling of rushing to get through everything I had hoped to do and accomplish with students. The greatest weakness that I can identify at this point in my teaching, is not having a good sense of how to pace myself and my lessons. I get so excited and caught up in the engagement of my students that I often mismanage the time we have together and end up spending a lot of time on certain things and rushing through the rest. In the few lessons that I've taught, I have come to realize that this sense of rushing is not just felt by me the teacher but also by the students. They may not explicitly recognize that we are rushing (after all they don't know what was planned to begin with) but as my anxiety increases about how much time is left, I believe they can sense it in my instructional style. This is when students often start to get over excited, be more competitive than cooperative in how they work together and start to produce quickly done, careless work. I need to come to terms with how much can honestly be accomplished in one lesson and be mindful of how much time we are spending on specific activities.
I think this emphasis and passion for meeting affective goals like engagement, interest level and investment of the students, stems from my background in informal education. At the museum, it was always important to create an engaging environment and experiences that were memorable and meaningful. In that informal education setting, the main goals related to encouraging student interest and motivating them to go out on their own and learn more about whatever you are teaching. I have come to realize that although this allows me to be strong in some areas of classroom teaching it causes me to struggle with meeting my more curriculum based objectives. It doesn't necessarily have to mean scratching all the fun things I've planned but perhaps means I should be saving them for another day or another lesson. I need to find a better balance between engagement and instruction. I need to learn what "less is more" means in the context of teaching within a classroom environment.
Another weakness I am aware of also stems from what I would also consider a strength. I am extremely eager to include my students voices in the classroom and in what we are learning. I believe strongly that we can all learn from each other and contribute to our experiences together to make them that much richer. Student's must be able to share their thoughts and feelings to become personally invested in their learning and to build a strong classroom community. Yet, I am struggling with how to manage all of this discourse. I find myself wanting to call on every hand I see, honor every question asked, validate every feeling expressed and celebrate every connection made. Unfortunately, that is an outrageously impossible thing to do within one lesson, let alone a whole day. Too often I give in and let students share when in reality we should really be moving on to the next activity. I start to feel self conscious about shutting them down and risking them becoming frustrated or disengaged. Yet, at the same time, I am also very weary of spending precious instructional time listening to student stories. Once again, I feel like there is a balance to be struck. I need a clear method and expectation for when and how students voices are heard and that should be explicitly clear to both myself and my students. This way I can stick to it without feeling guilty, and they don't have to feel that their contributions are unwanted or not appreciated.
However, sometimes my desire to have a positive and affective learning experience can result in some disorganization, classroom management issues and most significantly a feeling of rushing to get through everything I had hoped to do and accomplish with students. The greatest weakness that I can identify at this point in my teaching, is not having a good sense of how to pace myself and my lessons. I get so excited and caught up in the engagement of my students that I often mismanage the time we have together and end up spending a lot of time on certain things and rushing through the rest. In the few lessons that I've taught, I have come to realize that this sense of rushing is not just felt by me the teacher but also by the students. They may not explicitly recognize that we are rushing (after all they don't know what was planned to begin with) but as my anxiety increases about how much time is left, I believe they can sense it in my instructional style. This is when students often start to get over excited, be more competitive than cooperative in how they work together and start to produce quickly done, careless work. I need to come to terms with how much can honestly be accomplished in one lesson and be mindful of how much time we are spending on specific activities.
I think this emphasis and passion for meeting affective goals like engagement, interest level and investment of the students, stems from my background in informal education. At the museum, it was always important to create an engaging environment and experiences that were memorable and meaningful. In that informal education setting, the main goals related to encouraging student interest and motivating them to go out on their own and learn more about whatever you are teaching. I have come to realize that although this allows me to be strong in some areas of classroom teaching it causes me to struggle with meeting my more curriculum based objectives. It doesn't necessarily have to mean scratching all the fun things I've planned but perhaps means I should be saving them for another day or another lesson. I need to find a better balance between engagement and instruction. I need to learn what "less is more" means in the context of teaching within a classroom environment.
Another weakness I am aware of also stems from what I would also consider a strength. I am extremely eager to include my students voices in the classroom and in what we are learning. I believe strongly that we can all learn from each other and contribute to our experiences together to make them that much richer. Student's must be able to share their thoughts and feelings to become personally invested in their learning and to build a strong classroom community. Yet, I am struggling with how to manage all of this discourse. I find myself wanting to call on every hand I see, honor every question asked, validate every feeling expressed and celebrate every connection made. Unfortunately, that is an outrageously impossible thing to do within one lesson, let alone a whole day. Too often I give in and let students share when in reality we should really be moving on to the next activity. I start to feel self conscious about shutting them down and risking them becoming frustrated or disengaged. Yet, at the same time, I am also very weary of spending precious instructional time listening to student stories. Once again, I feel like there is a balance to be struck. I need a clear method and expectation for when and how students voices are heard and that should be explicitly clear to both myself and my students. This way I can stick to it without feeling guilty, and they don't have to feel that their contributions are unwanted or not appreciated.
Part II - How the teacher in progress could affect/effect my lessons?
When I reflect on my strengths and weaknesses I can see ways in which my social studies lessons would be affected. In particular both of my lessons involve a read aloud. The read aloud activity is one where these strengths and weaknesses identified really come out. I would like to think that my skill for assessing and promoting engagement makes me an effective reader of children's books. I am usually able to hold their attention during the story and help them to be active listeners. Rather than ask that students be passive, quiet listeners, I demand from them full participation, and allow and encourage their natural responses to the book, even if that means I have to stop and quiet them down sometimes before continuing. The effect of this seems to be that my students have better comprehension of the details and events of the story after the reading and can contribute to a meaningful discussion. Where I then go wrong with my read aloud activities is when I start soliciting questions and comments about the story. I have tried to do this both between a few pages during reading and also after reading is finished. Both methods are at times problematic for me. I have successfully set up the read aloud experience so that most students have been very engaged by the book and I'll have almost every student urgently wanting to contribute.
This is when they hit my weak spot. I see those eager hands, bodies wriggling with excitement and anticipation to be called on, and I immediately feel overwhelmed. Who do I call on? How long do I let them respond for? How many students should I hear from before moving on and how do I console and encourage the students who didn't have a chance to be heard? I almost feel like until I get the knack of this subtle balancing act of keeping students engaged but keeping the student responses brief, I'll need to set parameters for myself and make them known to my students. I think I should let them know that I will take one person's question or comment at the end of every other page, and then three questions or comments at the end of the book. I could also try to make things "fair" as students often say, and use the Popsicle sticks in a can method of choosing who will respond at first. While I believe this great amount of structure and "fairness" will help me stay on track and not let my eager students take over the time I had planned for instruction, I don't believe it is enough. I also need to discover a way to validate the voices that go unheard. I have seen some teachers do this by acknowledging the others with the hands raised by name somehow without technically calling on them to respond. I'm not sure if it would work as well for first graders because they lack the ability to write but I have always loved the idea of a teacher comments and questions box, where students can submit things they wanted to share but didn't get a chance to that I can quickly respond to at a later point. However the best method I can think of for dealing with this issue, is to better utilize the think-pair-share. This gives everyone a chance to voice what they are thinking without having to call on everyone individually. I want to make sure that I introduce and teach effective behavior and expectations for the think-pair-share part of my lessons.
I also believe that I need to be prepared to adjust the timing of my activities that follow the read aloud. Even with the think-pair-share helping our follow up discussion to be more productive, I feel that I may have as usual over planned or expected us to cover too much in a small amount of time. Therefore I will need to identify ahead of time how I will manage the independent work time and allow both myself and my students to not feel pressure to rush through it. I like the idea of having a portfolio so that they can see that unfinished work has a safe place where they can come back to it another time to finish up. It relieves some of the pressure on both myself and the students. However, I'm still feeling unsure that this is the right approach because really this individual work time is where the students really dig in and apply what we have thought about and learned. So I still think I may need to find ways to cut down my introductions and discussions to allow the students to have more work time on their own projects like the graphic organizers, the writing projects and pictures. I like the idea of having an extension planned if they are engaged and we want to come back to these ideas.
This is when they hit my weak spot. I see those eager hands, bodies wriggling with excitement and anticipation to be called on, and I immediately feel overwhelmed. Who do I call on? How long do I let them respond for? How many students should I hear from before moving on and how do I console and encourage the students who didn't have a chance to be heard? I almost feel like until I get the knack of this subtle balancing act of keeping students engaged but keeping the student responses brief, I'll need to set parameters for myself and make them known to my students. I think I should let them know that I will take one person's question or comment at the end of every other page, and then three questions or comments at the end of the book. I could also try to make things "fair" as students often say, and use the Popsicle sticks in a can method of choosing who will respond at first. While I believe this great amount of structure and "fairness" will help me stay on track and not let my eager students take over the time I had planned for instruction, I don't believe it is enough. I also need to discover a way to validate the voices that go unheard. I have seen some teachers do this by acknowledging the others with the hands raised by name somehow without technically calling on them to respond. I'm not sure if it would work as well for first graders because they lack the ability to write but I have always loved the idea of a teacher comments and questions box, where students can submit things they wanted to share but didn't get a chance to that I can quickly respond to at a later point. However the best method I can think of for dealing with this issue, is to better utilize the think-pair-share. This gives everyone a chance to voice what they are thinking without having to call on everyone individually. I want to make sure that I introduce and teach effective behavior and expectations for the think-pair-share part of my lessons.
I also believe that I need to be prepared to adjust the timing of my activities that follow the read aloud. Even with the think-pair-share helping our follow up discussion to be more productive, I feel that I may have as usual over planned or expected us to cover too much in a small amount of time. Therefore I will need to identify ahead of time how I will manage the independent work time and allow both myself and my students to not feel pressure to rush through it. I like the idea of having a portfolio so that they can see that unfinished work has a safe place where they can come back to it another time to finish up. It relieves some of the pressure on both myself and the students. However, I'm still feeling unsure that this is the right approach because really this individual work time is where the students really dig in and apply what we have thought about and learned. So I still think I may need to find ways to cut down my introductions and discussions to allow the students to have more work time on their own projects like the graphic organizers, the writing projects and pictures. I like the idea of having an extension planned if they are engaged and we want to come back to these ideas.