My Future ELA Classroom

My vision for my ideal ELA classroom starts with a positive atmosphere. I’m dedicated to establishing a positive classroom community so that my students feel safe and comfortable. I believe that this is the starting point for facilitating effective and efficient learning in the classroom. There are many factors that contribute to establishing this community within the classroom, one of which is organization. Being prepared does not ensure that a class with run smoothly, but being unprepared ensures that it will not. The more organized your classroom and your materials, the more smoothly you will be able to manage a class. The way that a classroom is organized contributes a great deal to the learning environment within it. Students should always be aware of what is expected of them both academically and behaviourally. Classroom procedures should be made clear to students. These procedural rules and guidelines will lead to a more efficient classroom and more cooperative students.

Building on the topic of organization, the way in which a classroom is organized contributes a great deal to the environment within it. Room decoration, disregarded by many teachers, is important in helping to create a positive classroom community. The use of bulletin boards and wall space helps to facilitate an encouraging and comfortable environment for students, especially when covered by the students’ own creations. Seating arrangements also contribute greatly to the classroom environment. Personally, when it comes to seating arrangements, I like the idea of having either a U-shaped arrangement or a grouped arrangement in order to encourage and facilitate collaboration among students.

Another hugely important factor to consider when attempting to establish a positive classroom community is the relationship between teacher and students. It is important for teachers to work on establishing mutual respect from the beginning of the school year. Although it may not be appropriate for teachers to become friends with their students, this does not mean that they cannot and should not be friendly with their students. It would be detrimental to avoid smiling with students. Students should always be able to see that you are happy to be there, because they most certainly will not be if they believe that you aren’t.

The most important factor in establishing respect and cooperation with students is lesson quality. It is a good teacher’s goal to ensure that they facilitate interesting and engaging lessons each day. Throughout our English Language Arts course, we have learned many different engaging, fun and educational strategies that I believe will prove to be very useful. I’m excited to get into the classroom and to begin trying these strategies with my students, such as ‘Tea Party’, ‘Poem in my Pocket’, double entry journals, writing prompts, blogging, and many more.

So, to summarize, what I want for my future ELA classroom is to establish a comfortable, collaborative, respectful and engaging learning environment.

Writing and Representing : A Catalyst for Becoming an Independent Thinker

Just last night I was having a friendly debate with a couple of friends. Thoughts, ideas, and opinions were flying around. Once our conversation had calmed down, we began to reflect on the benefits of having debates like this one. They are so beneficial because they get you thinking about other points of view and about why you hold the opinions that you do. Oftentimes, we take what we read or what we’re told as fact and it is a good thing to have those thoughts/ideas/opinions challenged – whether by others or through self reflection.

The majority of us are recurrently guilty of this sort of blind agreement. Children are particularly susceptible to this. They tend to take what they read and what they hear (from their parents and teachers especially) as fact. It is our job as educators to teach them to question – to question what they see, what they hear, what they’re told to be fact; it is our job to teach them to apply their previous knowledge, to make a judgement of their own; it is our job  to teach them to think critically.

Having students write and represent their (thoughts/ideas/opinions) is an excellent way to teach them to think independently. This is supported by the curriculum through the English Language Arts Prescribed Learning Outcomes C1, C3, and C4. C1 encourages “personal writing for a range of purposes and audiences that demonstrates connections to personal experiences, ideas, and opinions, featuring an honest voice”; C3 encourages “imaginative writing for a range of purposes and audiences, featuring an authentic voice”; C4 encourages the creation of “meaningful visual representations for a variety of purposes and audiences that communicate personal response, featuring development of ideas using clear, focussed, and useful details, and by making connections to personal feelings, experiences, opinions, and information.” I completely agree that the use of writing and representing helps students to express, to extend, and to analyse their thinking. This idea is also supported by Atwell. She explains that “when we help kids focus on craft and their own responses we encourage an active, critical stance” (284).

Another thing that I value as a future educator – something that I believe will also help kids to focus on their craft and that will encourage active, engaged learning and participation – is the value of choice. It is important to share responsibility with your students, to give them the freedom to choose what is important to them and how they want to go about expressing that. A teacher that María Paula Ghisa interviews in her article “Writing That Matters”: Collaborative Inquiry and Authoring Practices in a First-Grade Class “emphasized that writing is not primarily or fundamentally about responding to a teacher prompt, but that children have their own motivations for authorship” (Ghiso 346). It is important to give students authority over their voice so that they feel like writers and not just students being asked to write.

Terrific Technological Teaching Tool

           Students today don’t need to be lectured at; they need to be a part of constructing the content of what they're learning. It’s important to give them a sense of autonomy within the classroom so that they always remain interested in what they’re doing. Assigning a podcast over a paper is guaranteed to spike students’ interest and ensure their engagement while giving them some freedom to represent their learning in their own way.

            
          Creating a podcast allows students to share their knowledge and their learning experiences. Students today are surrounded by technology and we can teach them that they don’t have to be passive consumers of media, but that they can produce their own. One benefit to podcasting is that students get to see their work out there; they can share it with the world rather than just their class. Their audience is much larger which may make their work more meaningful to them. Knowing that they are responsible for putting new knowledge out into the world might give them the drive and motivation to edit and perfect their work more so than if they were simply sharing with their teacher or their classmates. Teachers could also use this technology to provide their students with important information recorded in class for students to review, or to provide additional material that students would be able to watch as homework (which would be much more stimulating that reading a text). Students would be able to view these podcast on their iPods or iPads while doing other things - for example, taking the bus – and this would allow students to better time manage their work.

         There are multiple ways in which I can think to incorporate podcasting into the classroom. To start, there are many situations where I think that using a podcast as a teacher will be very beneficial. For example, in a science class - to demonstrate a reaction that we may not have time to complete in class or that might not be deemed safe for an in-classroom experiment – or in a P.E. class – to demonstrate proper form before starting a unit (especially if I as a teacher am not particularly skilled at said unit). An example of where student-centered podcasting would be useful is for research projects. After having them to do research about a certain topic, have them then make a creative podcast. For instance, after researching certain pieces of art, students could create an unofficial audio guide to a faux art museum where these pieces of art are on display. These are just a few examples of the many ways in which podcasts can be utilized in the classroom. The flexibility of this technology makes it an extremely valuable educational tool.

Curriculum - does it help or hinder? Student's of today - who are they and how do they learn?

           As a student in the PDPP, with our first practicum looming, there is a nervousness of not being prepared, of not know exactly what to do and a fear of not being able to do it “right”. This nervousness is slightly diminished knowing that we have such a descriptive guide to follow. In this way, the IRPs are extremely helpful for beginning teachers. They outline in extreme detail what needs to be covered, as well as what students should be able to accomplish once it has been covered. They even go as far as to suggest ways in which the information can or should be covered. For beginning teachers who are somewhat lacking in confidence due to lack of experience, the IRPs are immensely beneficial.

           

            Having said all that, the IRPs from K-12 for English Language Arts alone are approximately 900 pages. Daunting doesn’t even begin to cover it. I’m sure that once we’ve started working through all of the content, and have prepared the mountain of lesson plans that are required, this task won’t seem quite as impossible. As of right now, however, I reiterate: daunting.

            A way in which the IRPs hinder us as future teachers is that, when it comes to the content, the material is rather prescribed. To its credit, I have learned that recent changes have made it less so. As future teachers, we are given more freedom than those before us, which I am grateful for. There are many suggestions on how to teach the prescribed material throughout the IRPs and I think that it is important for us as future teachers to take note that these are only suggestions. Everybody teaches differently and with different styles – this is important to remember. Something that I believe does need to be taken away from the IRPs suggestions, however, is the importance of maintaining an active and engaging atmosphere in the classroom. This is how students learn best. Other than their engrossment in technology and the benefit that today’s students will get from the integration of technology into education, today’s students are no different than yesterday’s students. I don’t believe that students learn differently now; I believe that we have developed newer and better ways of teaching.  

My Expectations

Well, I’ll start off this blog by introducing myself. My name is Casey McKnight and I am currently just finishing my first month of UVic’s Post Degree Education Program. So far I’m loving it and learning a lot. This blog is essentially an assignment for my English Language Arts course and our goal for this first posting is to describe a bit about what we expect ELA in a middle school classroom to look like/sound like/ be like.

Previous to the introduction to this course, I hadn’t put too much consideration into English Language Arts being much more than the instruction of reading and writing. I realize now that I was very mistaken. Not only through reading and writing, but also through engaging and interactive methods such as speaking, listening, viewing and representing, the instruction of English Language Arts aids in encouraging and preparing students to integrate themselves into the world and to enable them to participate actively and with purpose in all aspects of society. I presume that my superficial assumption of the subject content was due to my personal learning experiences as a child. My recollection of my past experience with English Language Arts is of, for the most part, sitting in a quiet classroom, silently working on my writing or reading a book. I can recall very few instances where my classmates and I were actively engaged with either the teacher or with one another. 

This is not what I expect of a more current classroom – of my future classroom. I understand that it is important to address the students’ needs and to help give them a sense of autonomy while upholding my role as their instructor, mentor and guide. In the words of Nancie Atwell, it’s my responsibility as their teacher to be “a listener and a teller, an observer and an actor, a collaborator and a critic and a cheerleader.” Students at the middle school age are in the middle of so many changes, both mentally and physically. They’re attempting to find themselves while simultaneously dealing with the onslaught of insecurities that puberty and adolescence brings. I expect to face many challenges due to their wavering temperament, their longing to find themselves and their need to be challenged intellectually. As a result of all of this, I can’t say exactly what I expect an ELA middle school classroom to look like/sound like/ be like, but I am excited to find out and to face the challenges it brings head on!