With this quarter, I feel like I finally reached a point where I am taking courses that not only were my favorite, but also seemed to be the most pertinent towards learning how to be a teacher. Saying that, this has been my heaviest quarter, taking 493, 408, and 413 with student teaching. Aside from being in the an actual classroom, these course, mostly 493, have really given me a good feeling about what it means to be a teacher. Before this point, I was interested in becoming a teacher, but felt jaded as everything we learn prior to this seemed like it only pertained to the pros of being a teacher. I felt like it wasn’t realistic to the classroom, and found myself becoming a bit negative towards the realities of becoming a teacher. I understand that we needed a base for everything that we learned, and reality would come later. Looking back, I am glad the progression went that way because if I had learned the realities first, I may have tried to do something else. Seeing the progression in the big picture, I am glad that 493 was towards the end of my sequence. I would not have understood or grasped all of the concepts that we learned in this class. Even throughout the beginning of the class, I had a hard time reading the pedagogies and theories because I had a hard time connecting it to reality. I was going about it the wrong way. They weren’t ways to be a perfect teacher or how things must be, they were guides for me to use to be able to differentiate instruction. Without knowing so many theories, it would be impossible to think about and teach effectively towards multiple types of learners.
Until about half way through this course, I had a lot of trouble with differentiated instruction. I could not bring myself to believe that it was possible to teach in such a way that you hit every type of learner in one go around. I knew that it was possible, maybe for the best of the best. I knew the definition of differentiated instruction, but I didn’t understand what it meant to students as learners. Not having been in school for 10 years prior to EWU, I don’t remember what high school was like and only have professors as an example of differentiated instruction. Generally, professors did not utilize differentiated instruction and it was a “my way or the highway” type of scenario. I had to learn how to please each professor in different way to earn a good grade. I thought, “what is the point of differentiated instruction in high school when students get to college and must cater to the professors’’ wants?” I wasn’t looking at the big picture. It isn’t that teachers are catering to students’ individual needs, it’s that they are providing many learning avenues to get them ready for what is after high school. If we don’t introduce other types of learning, they will be set on a single course. I think of it like people who are career military. They only have one way of thinking and learning. The learning style was to get yelled and punished for mistakes for the first few years of their career, so of course they would do that to others. IF a teacher only teaches with advanced organizers, they are doing students a disservice by not introducing other concepts to them. This lesson to me was the most valuable idea from this course. It is something I tried to apply to my unit plan, and later on an even bigger scale with multiple unit plans.
If I started the unit plan early in the course, I wouldn’t have incorporated what I had found for myself regarding differentiated instruction. Creating the unit plan, I utilized about eight different learning strategies. I knew that I needed to have more than one. At first I wanted to make it completely different, but I remembered that I had to teach it, so I must be comfortable with what I was doing. I thought about how I learned best, knowing that others don’t learn like me. I have gone my whole college career using a single legal pad for notes. I don’t take notes, probably never will. I learn by listening and with conversations. I cannot expect all students to learn that way. I thought that I could center a unit on cooperative learning that cycles the other learning strategies from lesson to lesson. In the end, the unit was compromised of mostly cooperative learning that had aspects of other styles in it. I doubt this is anything new, but it is to me and there is always something nice when figured out by yourself. I think about how the real world is and how these students won’t have a job that makes work in one single way. They will have to know how to work with others as well as managing their own person workload. Any one learning strategy may be a student’s best strategy, but without knowing or understanding others, they won’t be effective unless they can solely stick to their favorite. I see this as a learning opportunity for them. I don’t need to take notes to succeed, but I still need to know how to take and use them. Knowing this, I can’t teach just one strategy to students because I will be short changing them in the end. I have to remind myself that it isn’t about me, it’s about the students, which I think is a huge underlying factor of this course.
I took a while trying to figure out which book I was going to use for the book talk section of the class. I have not read or don’t remember much adolescent literature as I didn’t read until I was about 24. It was easy to just pick a book that I liked and try to sell that. It wasn’t about me, it was about the students and I couldn’t help but think about the stuff they shoot at kids with the “literature cannon”. I was shot by that cannon and I don’t remember a single story. Tried to think about what was popular today, and Dystopian Literature came to mind. With Walking Dead and Hunger Games, I thought that I should find something that will take them from the reading level of those to more complex texts. It is all well and good for kids to read, but if they don’t venture out and up, they won’t broaden their reading horizons. I say I didn’t read until I was 24, which was a bit of a fib. In elementary school, I read a boat load of books like Goosebumps, Hardy Boys, all of the big conglomerate titles. I never ventured further, I just kept reading the same stuff, and eventually I quit because I grew out of it with nothing new to try. Maybe I was pushed to read other books, I don’t know. I never made the leap to higher level books and looking back, it was probably the reason I stopped reading. Eventually those books became kids’ books, and I had nothing else to read. I exhausted the titles I liked. Picking Children of Men, my idea was that if we don’t guide students to higher level reading about subjects they like, it is unlikely that they will do it on their own. I look at myself as an example. I loved to read as a kid, and do as an adult, but there was a twenty year gap in between. As a teacher candidate, I feel that I need to find relatable books, but books that will push them to go further than their current reading level. IF a student reads only reads Hunger Games clones, they won’t ever make the jump to more complex literature. If they don’t move to more complex literature, they will burn out or not move on. While Children of Men most likely isn’t suitable for high school (I think it could be if sold right), it provides a jump into more complex texts on the subject that is popular today.
When making the mini lesson, I had a lot of fun with it. The most difficult part about it was figuring out how to make Romeo and Juliet entertaining. I think I did a good job. While watching others present, I was able to see things that they did well on or did not so good on. The one thing that stood out the most to me is how people’s personalities would change when they began to teach. I think about DR. Agriss telling us that he taught how he thought he was expected to teach and not as who he was. I thought that was an important statement about teaching. If I can’t be myself, I don’t want to do something. I would watch people get up there and call people by titles and surnames. They didn’t do that before, why do it now. It felt alienating. Maybe it was just me, but it was something I made sure not to do. I’m a believer that relationships with students are the number one priority for teachers and that we need that in order to get the kids interested in learning. I fed off the energy of the classroom when I was teaching. I think that is just how my own personal ego works, but it really helps to see that people are having fun. Seeing that makes me more confident. I don’t know if people got anything out of what I did. Next quarter I think I will ask a few people if they remember the point of the lesson.
I know I am not the first person to say that the unit plan was tough, but I am glad I did it. I don’t imagine that I will have to make another unit plan unless we make them in English Capstone. While doing the unit plan I realized that fifteen days is not a whole lot of time to do anything in the classroom and that I needed to change how I wrote lessons plans. Prior to this (I was getting out of the habit slowly though), I would make a lesson, and the put CCSS into it. Doing this it was like writing a paper and putting a thesis on at the end. It was so much easier to plan a lesson around a single standard rather than pick standards that went with what you were teaching, because a lot of standards have vague snippets that can relate to anything.
Before this class, I also didn't really understand the CCSS. I won’t say that I understand them now, but I have a much better grasp on what it means to teach this this way. Before, I just saw them as new standards. I don’t know what the old standards were, I just know that assessment prior to CCSS is knowledge based whereas CCSS is skills based. I really noticed this in the classroom during student teaching. I had the chance to see the real differences in the CCSS vs. the older style of standards. My cooperating teacher was openly against CCSS, and I didn’t blame him, I understood where he was coming from. We can’t expect teachers to change their teaching after decades of doing it another way. From the four lessons that I performed and watching him teach, I could see a clear distinction between learning knowledge and learning skills. The goal in my lessons was to show students how to see books in more ways than just one. His teaching was more of memorization of the text. I don’t think that either was right or wrong, but instead showed me how different the teaching is based on standards. There I realized that the CCSS isn't right or wrong; it is the new direction of education and it is something that we have to embrace. I now see the point of CCSS. It creates accountability for teachers as well as provide students with a learning model that scaffolds their skill. In one of my books this quarter I found a quote by Marzano that said if schools taught all the skills required of students by graduation, it would take 22 years, almost double the time they are in school(Marzano, I turned the book in). This date was in the late 90s, way before CCSS. I really liked this quote because it shows that we as teachers have to give the students the skills to teach themselves. If we want students to learn all of these skills, we have to scaffold their schemas by providing them with skills to do it on their own. With this I get what it means to teach them skills. Skills will make them self-sufficient. This is something that I really believe in and is what makes me believe in the CCSS. Knowledge is good and all, but if kids don’t have the schema to figure it out for themselves, they won’t. After this course, I finally have a rationale for teaching skills to students for their own success rather than doing it because it is the new fad or what is expected of new teachers.
Sincerely,
Eddie
