Including Content

I'm now in my sixth week of student teaching. I feel like I've learned a lot. My cooperating teacher is very good at giving me feedback and helping me to find ways in which I can become a better teacher. I know there will always be room for improvement. In my mind, you've got to be completely open to feedback and re-visioning your teaching throughout your career.

I'm really excited about an ESL Library Night that I'm putting together for our students. It will be in a little over a month. It will be held at the neighborhood library. Students and parents will get the opportunity to discover what the library has to offer and to get set up with a library card if they don't already have one. I think it will be a good opportunity for our youngsters.

My goal for the past couple of weeks has been to conference more often with the regular classroom teachers to find out what each ESL student need more help with and to find out what content they might be struggling with. All of the teachers have been very helpful in this regard. In particular, they've directed me toward some great resources that match up with students' needs. At times, it has been difficult to balance between content and language objectives, but I think I'm learning how to blend the dual aims in an effective way.

The elementary students I work with inspire me every day. They always surprise me. They've got a wonderful perspective on the world. They're curiosity and positive nature are certainly contagious. When I started this assignment, I wasn't so sure I would be interested in teaching at the elementary level. However, because of this experience, I've become enthused about the possibility of working with elementary folks. In preparation for working with these students, I read a book by Mimi Brodsky Chenfeld called "Celebrating Young Children and Their Teachers." This book not only prepared me for teaching the younger grades, it really opened my eyes to the wonders of teaching young people. I've applied a few of the books' pieces of advice already and the students have responded extremely positively!

Observed!

I'm in the middle of my fourth week of student teaching now. Today, my supervisor came in to school and observed me for the first time. I did a lesson for 5th graders on editing their own writing. She had a lot of positive feedback, which I was happy to hear. In particular, she mentioned how I gave good scaffolding support to the students.

She also had some good feedback as to how I could make my lessons better. We utilize the SIOP model for lesson planning at our University, and my supervisor noticed that my content and language objectives were nearly identical. She suggested that my lessons might benefit from including more content-based instruction. I agreed. I noticed that my example sentences in the early part of the lesson were completely without context. Binding these sentences together by relating them to some sort of meaningful context would have made them mor engaging and relevant to the students.

While I have many years of experience teaching adults, I don't have the same breadth of background knowledge in teaching youngsters. I'm really looking forward to the rest of my student teaching as a great opportunity to learn more about teaching young people and to continue to imporve as a teacher.