Final Project

I am typing a one page Word document reflection about each week of clinical experience in the classroom at Normal Community High School.

Post 4

 I have not decided yet if reading these articles should make me feel more confident about my teaching ability or question my desire to teach. We have been reading and studying the methods and strategies to teach but when it comes down to the real world, some people cut it and some do not. The Sleeter article discusses the effect of race in a classroom. It is important to know what different classroom atmospheres are like because of ethnic composition and it is also important to be aware of the differences one will encounter in a class.  Race is something that unfortunately is taken into account by others. I know we all had the issue with diversity hours required by the department. Well, as much of a pain that it would have been to complete the 50 hours, it is something that should be implemented in the program here at ISU. I do feel that they need to fix the kinks and get all the preparations done prior to enforcing the change to the curriculum. Race is going to be something we are all going to deal with, considering the fact that we want to be ESL teachers. Whether we are in a rural or urban setting, more and more schools have to ESL classes. It is always better to be aware of differences and be prepared to deal with a miscommunication or misunderstanding in the classroom that can stem from a cultural difference. I often wonder how to embrace a culture without being stereotypical when I'm asking questions about traditions or music for example. I would hope that the atmosphere created in the classroom allows for open discussion and the students would not take offense by my curiosity.

Post 3

 As I read for this week, what stuck with me was how important it is for teachers to grasp every opportunity to teach. Mostly this occurs in the middle of a lesson, which can sometimes mean teachers will not pause or stray from their plan in order to address an issue at hand. As the book said, there are learning opportunities everywhere and it is up to us as future teachers to know when to take advantage of such. I never really thought of it in that way before or how powerful a question can be. Another good point is that if one student is asking a question, there is a really good chance another student or even more than one, had the same question. This helps the teacher in a way to know what to focus on or to stop and return to a difficult, confusing topic or idea. As I read the examples of the opportunities, I found the transcripts a little hard to follow, but I think I pulled the overall theme out of the material. My question though, is how far off topic should we go if the question is unrelated. Is that something we can focus on after class or separately during individual work time? Or should we include it in the discussion at the time the comment is posed?

Post 2

 From my experience as a student of foreign language I recall a few different approaches being used. In high school much of the focus was on memorized dialogue, audiolingualism. This means that we were given a prompt and had to either create a dialogue of our own or we were just told to memorize a scenario from the textbook. I do not feel this is the best way to go about learning a foreing language. I do not remember specifically my teacher correcting my pronunciation of the words. I remember as a student being very nervous to have the whole script memorized. I do not think this facilitated learning. In fact I would say it impaired my ability to focus on the language because I was too nervous about saying each word in order. The cognitive approach was also implemented in high school. We focused on learning a grammar lesson and then putting it into practice. This was not the best approach because as I recall, the activities and exercises followed a certain formula. This lead to issues once a student had the opportunity to answer open ended questions and state their opinion. I remember the communicative approach more in the higher levels of the language. We were able to discuss in groups the language and have dialogues based on a role-plays and prompts. I feel that these approaches are comfortable to me because that is what I am used to doing. But, in college when there were other approaches used or even a lack of approach and it was lecture based, I had to adapt. I do not believe that one single approach can lead to learning in a student. There needs to be a combination of parts from different approaches in order to be a successful teacher. For example including dialogue in the classroom is very important. However, the memorization may not be the way to practice dialogue. A scenario with different options can perhaps assist the learning process.

 My first comment on the readings is on the first sentence. The saying that teaching is both an art and a sicence. I interpret this as the idea that we as teachers have a way of doing things that have specific reasons and purposes (the science) and the students can interpret the results (the art). The art can also be that there is room for creativity when creating a lesson. I disagree with the the sentence in chapter 1 which states that teachers are passive technicians just passing knowledge along. It is the purpose of the teacher to teach the knowledge. This cannot be done by simply passing on the content. The teacher needs to make lessons and organize appropriate activites in order to reach the objectives. The idea of a teacher being a reflective practitioner makes more sense because it is a conscious effort rather than a routine action done because it has been tradition. The other idea of teachers who are willing to reflect upon the ideological principles that inform their practice is a good thing. Teachers need to be aware of the social issues and other aspects that are taken into account once inside the classroom. In the second chapter the author discusses methods. The fact that methods is so loosely used in our field of education makes it difficult to define the term. We do know though, that methods are continuously being added to try and improve the way all teachers approach a classroom. We also know that not one single method is the end all be all. This is because the "methods are based on idealized concepts geared toward idealized contexts." This is a bold quote that has a lot of meaning behind it. I find this very fascinating because of all the variables that need to be taken into account. A classroom is an unpredictable place, and a set method is not going to be the way to deal with an extraneous situation.