I first wanted to start by saying how important it
is that we were able to set goals for ourselves. It is great to have an
overarching goal to strive towards every time we step foot into a classroom at
Brigham. While I do believe having the goal is great it was extremely hard for
me to come up with a goal without first meeting the students. The goal that I
came up with is, “I want to be able to actively involve the English Language
Learners in every classroom activity. I hope to learn the tools and techniques
to be able to do that.” I made this goal based off of the English Language
Learners I have at my clinical site because it is something we have to consider
when planning every lesson or activity.
Sometimes I feel like these students do not
receive the education or attention that they should get because they do not
completely know the language. This often leaves them left out or confused. To
me, an important part of teaching English Language Learners is to create an
open and trusting relationship with them. This way the student feels
comfortable telling you that they do not understand what is being asked of them
or trying words in English that they are not used to using. I think I will make
this my second goal while in the classrooms at Brigham. I have a feeling this
goal is going to be harder to reach than some of the goals I have set for
myself in the past because we are not in the classroom every week. It will be a
challenge to build that relationship with these students because by the time I
am back in their classroom two weeks will have past and they may not remember
who I am. The second goal I am going to set for myself is to use the student’s
first language whenever I can to help them understand what is being asked of
them. I have taken six years of Spanish so I am able to speak some short
sentences. However, I am not nearly as good at speaking, as I want to be. I
know that I can use pictures, give longer wait time, and actively use my
hands/facial expressions when I talk which can help them comprehend a little
bit more. However, I still need to learn different tools/techniques that will
aid my conversations with English Language Students
This
week was my first week working within the preschool classroom at Brigham. So,
it was the first week I was able to work on my goal within the preschool
classroom. It was extremely hard for me to work on this goal because I did not know
which students were English language learners. Looking back, I wish I would have
asked before giving our lesson. Now that I know which students in the preschool
class are English language learners I will be able to actively pursue my goal. The one aspect of the classroom that I noticed was that many of the items were labeled in both Spanish and English which is definitely something I will do in my future classroom.
While
I did not learn as much as I wanted to learn about my goal this week I did
learn a very important lesson on time management within the classroom. Our
lesson did not last near as long as we thought it would. This came as a surprise
to all of us and showed me just how important it is to always have a backup
activity incase a lesson finishes early or a students finishes early. As teachers we need to me masters of or minutes.
Exceeds: I went over the word count and I incorporated experiences from my clinical cite.
Kalya,
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing your insight on the experience we shared in the classroom today! I agree with the fact that it is highly important to make goals for yourself and be reflective upon your experiences during and after working with a group of students in order to continue constantly improving your teachings. You formulated some well thought out goals in regards to working with English Language Learners. You have caused me to reflect upon my own goals I have for in the classroom and the importance of making adjustments to them once we interact with the actual students. You brought up an important point in that we will only be working with these students once time every two weeks, which makes it very different from working with students on a daily basis, where they might be much more comfortable and familiar with you. You were very proactive in realizing what obstacles needed to be overcome in order to work toward being successful with your goals! I too noticed that the room was labeled in both English and Spanish words. Seeing this for our future lessons, I think we can plan to include both English and Spanish words with any activity we will have planned. This will correspond nicely with what the teacher already has set up in her classroom environment and will ensure that we are reaching the understanding of each and everyone one of the students. You also brought up some strong points having to do with English Language Learners in the classroom that I have not necessarily thought about before. The fact that they do not receive the education they should simply because they might not know when to speak up when they don’t understand something or things become unclear. I too will make an effort to acknowledge this possibility and offer those extra supports for those who need them!
- Julia Spencer
Kayla,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading about your experience at Brigham and the goals you have set for yourself! I also agree that it is really important to set goals for ourselves and it gives us an opportunity to think about our experience in the classroom. It gives us an opportunity to grow as future teachers and learn from the experiences that we are gaining at Brigham! I could not agree more with what you said about building a relationship with students that is open and trusting. It is going to be difficult to do that with the students at Brigham because there is so much time between each of our visits and we are not in the same classroom the whole time we are there. However, it is still important to try to create these relationships with the students because it is important for them to feel comfortable and communicate with us when they do not understand what is happening in the classroom. I have experienced this type of relationship that was not comfortable between an ELL student and her teacher. In my third grade clinical placement during the Spring, the student and the teacher clearly did not have that comfortable relationship because she would not talk to the teacher unless she had to go to the bathroom. Even then you could see that the teacher was uncomfortable and so was the student. The student would quickly open up as soon as the ELL teacher came into the classroom to work with her. I am glad that I read your blog and your goal because it made me reflect on this experience and think about how important it is. I hope to strive for this as we continue at Brigham and in my PDS classroom.
Kayla,
ReplyDeleteI thought you did a great job summarizing how everyone was feeling that initial time of stepping into the classroom. I feel that we all held extremely high expectations for ourselves, yet were unprepared for the reality of the situation. I think it is always easier to translate your thoughts onto paper rather than implementing them in person. Although I think we all did a good job in the classroom, I feel that our expectations were altered when we met the students. I feel that we truly don’t know what it’s like for English Language Learners because we have truly never been in their shoes. I truly felt for the children in the kindergarten class I was placed in because I don’t know if I was explaining myself well enough for them to understand. My goals included wanting to know more about the weaknesses ELL exhibit so that I can do everything in my power to remedy the situation. I applaud you for taking each experience to heart so that you can better you own situation, as well as helping out those in your preschool class. I also can relate to your time management debacle. I have been in your situation where a lesson has wrapped up early and then the children are left restless and behavioral issues occur. It is imperative to “over” plan so that the students do not become restless. If you continue engaging them in the material, not only will they be more susceptible to learning the lesson, but they will be engaged within the activity you created.
Kayla,
ReplyDeleteI truly agree with how difficult it was to come up with a goal for these students when we had not yet met them. I had no idea what to expect when walking into our room. Even though the other half of our class had told us the week before I was still feeling unsure of what to expect. I think that it was a great idea to base your goal of ELL students you have at you clinical site since you see them so much more! You can now apply this goal to both schools. I think you made an excellent goal as well! This will require multiple steps, including getting to know your students well enough so that they feel comfortable with you. Also, I do not know how familiar you are with the tools and techniques you have mentioned but I can only assume those would take lots of mistakes and practices to perfect! I’m sure you can do it!
I agree with you %110 percent that children need an open and trusting environment for them to feel as though they can learn, be engaged, and participate. I think that we need to have this kind of relationship with the students but also the students need to build a relationship like this with each other. I like that you mentioned that you are going to make a goal of speaking the student’s native language as much as you can. As teachers we need to constantly set higher and higher goals for not only the students but for ourselves as well. I can see you doing that here in your blog post alone. Being in the classroom with you I can agree that we maybe should have gotten a feel for who was an ELL student. This would have been very helpful. I also think that we were all very nervous not knowing what to expect so we may not have been thinking clearly! This is maybe something we can set as a “group goal”. I also hope that next time we are in the room we are able to find ways to stay in the room the whole time!
Kayla,
ReplyDeleteWe both stressed the importance of setting goals for ourselves. I feel that without setting goals we aren’t giving ourselves any room to grow and improve. The first few years we are in the field are going to probably be the years we learn the most. Without telling ourselves what we should do, how can we hope to become better.
Your goal was very specific! To actively engage ours English Language Learners. I feel that this semester we have a a real group of students in our clinical site to base our goals and lessons off of which is great because it gives me a visual of what I am actually planning for. But what about those times when we haven’t met and worked with our students yet? You bring up a good point. I feel that as teachers we can do our best to be flexible. If we are implementing a lesson for the first time with a new group of students I think there are a few keys to making it easier on the students and ourselves. The first one would be clearly state and given a visual if possible of any and all directions. We can’t except students to do something if we haven’t told them what to do or how to do it. The second way would be keep the lesson going. As I have learned from my clinical site, when students have down time I lose their focus. One of my goals for PDS is working on planning for that downtime. The last way I can think of would be to give feedback or words of encouragement to students. Did they work really hard or go above and beyond what was asked? Tell them! They like the praise!
As a group I think we learned what we can work on for next time we teach at Brigham. We are still students after all and we haven’t learned everything.
Kayla,
ReplyDeleteI loved that you talked about the importance of goals. I think that this is something that is really important as well. I think that this will help us to become better educators. We are pushing ourselves to be the best educators that we can be and to help our students at the same time. I think that it is important to reflect on these goals and see how we can be constantly improving or if something did not go as well as it should that we are thinking and reflecting on how we can do better next time in order to have success happen. I think that time management like you mentioned is important. This is something that I personally struggle with as well. A lot of times I plan for too much and then run out of time for things that are really important for the students to be doing. This is also a hard to concept to perfect. I think that it will take a lot of time and practice so I am glad that we are getting all this practice not only in our PDS sites but also here at Brigham. I think that we just need to keep working at it and eventually one day it will fall into place and it will all of a sudden be really clear. I think that you have some really good goals and they are ones that we could all be thinking about and working on. English language learner students need more attention and instruction than some other students so they do not fall behind and we make sure that they are being just as successful as their other classmates.