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.
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