A Semester of Growth

The last few months have flown by. This doesn't surprise me, especially given that time just seems to keep speeding up the older I get, but it does make me wish that I'd made more time to sit down and write about everything that I've learned and discovered. Looking back on the days I've spent in my classroom, a lot of things have started to blend together, not so that I can't pick out individual moments, but so that I have a hard time remembering the order in which they occurred or what happened on the same day. But on the broader scale, it's interesting to me to see the shift in what I've been focusing on in the classroom and my involvement in the classroom.

The first few days that I was at my placement, particularly the first day, in many ways I was overwhelmed by trying to take everything in, from the set up of the classroom to learning the students' names to observing and learning from my mentor's teaching style. There was so much that I wanted to figure out all at once, that it took a couple of placement days and the days in between to settle into a more natural method of observation for myself. In those first days, I tried to write down everything that happened and I was terrified that I would miss something important; I was so busy trying to get everything written in my notebook that I don't think I was actually learning as much as I could have been. Generally speaking, I learn best by doing, by jumping into whatever it is I'm trying to learn about and experiencing it first hand. When I was busy with my nose in my notebook, desperately trying not to miss writing down anything important, I could have been learning by being more actively involved in the classroom and only writing down things that really struck me and I didn't want to forget. It would have made for a more useful notebook and better learning experience for me. And this is what I transitioned to over the course of the semester; I've been trying to only pull out my notebook for recording more significant and unique observations while I spend more of my time engaging with the students, my mentor, and the classroom.

Over the course of this semester, I've definitely learned a lot from my mentor, but I've also developed more confidence in my ability to work with the students and teach them. On my first day, there was no way that I would have felt comfortable even working one-on-one with a student to help them read a book or work through a math problem. On my last day for the semester, I led our Reader's Workshop. I taught a mini-lesson which continued our unit on "spying" on characters, or rather using context clues in the book to learn more about the characters than what is explicitly stated in the text; I had the students split off into reading pairs for partner reading, and sat down with four or five pairs to listen to them helping each other and reading their books; and I led sharing time on the rug where the students could tell the rest of the class about times during partner reading that they had "spied" on their characters. The entire time, I was trying to think about everything that I'd seen my mentor teacher do during lessons that I liked and that I'd seen the students respond well to, but I also ended up falling into a natural rhythm of my own. It was fantastic. I usually have fun and enjoy going to my placement, but for the majority of the workshop, the experience was even better; I found myself in almost a zen-like space. I was calm, but having fun and enjoying myself immensely. I listened to almost half of the class read anywhere from a few pages to a full book, and I felt so proud of the entire class when everywhere I looked, the students who were paired up were helping each other through parts where their partners were getting stuck and sitting back and listening when their partner was fine. One pair even decided to read an Elephant and Piggie book together with each of them reading for one character; they traded off to read all of the speech bubbles in order with one of them reading all of Piggie's dialogue and the other reading all of Gerald's.

In addition to what I've learned about teaching in the classroom this semester, I feel like another large part of what I've taken away from my field placement so far has been finding out more about what happens outside of the classroom and discovering more things that I want to learn about. When I started my field placement, I knew that a large part of teachers' jobs occur outside the classroom; like most fields, there are a lot of things that have to happen behind the scenes to make things work in the classrooms and work for each student. Many of these are things that I think people outside the field of education either don't know about or take for granted; I know better now than ever that no teacher's work ends when they walk out of their classroom at the end of the day, even if I still have a lot to learn about what the work that happens outside of the classroom is. While that area is for the most part still a black box of mystery to me, I've definitely started to learn more about it.

While I won't be back at my placement until after Olin's winter break, I can't wait to start again. This semester has been amazing just going in once a week; I can only imagine getting to work with the class and learn from my mentor more frequently will be even better, even if it's a bit more tiring.

First Day in the First Grade

October 9th, 2015 was the first time I'd been in an elementary school during school hours since I was an elementary student. It was the first time that I'd really tried to see the room and the process from the perspective of a teacher. It was the first time I've ever tried to be an educator to some degree in an academic setting. It was nerve racking. It was amazing.

When I stepped into the building that Friday, I didn't feel like a student teacher coming in for her first day of field placement; I felt like I was in elementary school again and today was the first day. I really didn't know what to expect; after talking with my mentor teacher on the phone a week earlier, I felt confident that I had a good mentor teacher, I was going to be in a diverse and interesting classroom, and that I would quickly become a part of the class, but I had no idea what that actually meant.

It's amazing how much you can forget in ten years about what elementary school is like, and how much of what you do remember looks completely different from the perspective of an adult. Even before the students arrived, I felt mildly overwhelmed trying to take in the classroom while also taking it apart; trying to determine why things were arranged the way they were, what the room told me about the class, identifying different tools and details that we'd discussed in lectures. With those filters on, my perception of the room's complexity increased significantly. Within minutes I could see that the class has a heavy emphasis on reading - there are shelves of books which dominate most of the accessible wall space, each child has their own bucket filled with books that they want to read during Reader's Workshop, and most of the posters on the walls described different tools for the children to use while reading and picking out books - and I could see that the layout of the room was set up to provide students with a certain degree of autonomy - everything in the room was at a height that children could interact with and reach comfortably, even the teacher's "desk." It was fun to try and guess what different areas of the room were used for and what the structure of the day would be before the class actually began.

Once the students did arrive, I found myself so distracted by just trying to observe as much as I could, that I spent most of my time jotting down notes. Well, jotting down notes and trying to learn all of the students' names. While I definitely worked to be more than just a bystander with her nose and pen buried in a notepad, there was so much going on that I hadn't seen before that everything seemed like something I should take notes on. I bounced back and forth between notes specifically about the lesson we were currently doing, to notes on the room, class, and atmosphere in general, to writing down my observations of the students when I had opportunities to work with them on different assignments.

To call the overall experience overwhelming would probably be a bit of an understatement, but at the same time, I loved every second of it. Just observing my mentor teach and picking up on the various aspects of her teaching style was interesting on its own, but adding in the ability to see how the actual children responded to it brought those observations to a whole new level. The class itself also made for a wonderful experience. As obvious as it may sound, I was excited to see how every child in the class had a distinctly unique personality. Even if it took me a while to be able to match names with faces, I had no problems remembering who each of the kids were. Trying to observe all of them and get a feel for how their minds work and what their favorite parts of the day are was an immediate reminder of why I'd been so excited to learn how to teach.

I can't wait to find my groove in the classroom, work with my mentor and the students to grow as an aspiring teacher, and see how the students grow over the course of the year.