Thinking back on what strategies one of my favorite teacher used made me appreciate how hard she worked so much more than I did while I was in high school. My senior English teacher used many different strategies to help us learn. I didn't realize it at the time, but now that I've started teaching, I can see the different strategies she used to help facilitate learning to everyone in our class. When I was in her class I had no idea what she was doing, but looking back I can see that she was very intentional with some strategies that she would use. The strategies she used were cooperative group learning, community circle, and graduated difficulty.
As a math person, English has never been my strong suite(which I'm sure some of you could tell based off reading these blogs), so I think my teacher using cooperative learning groups helped me tremendously during my senior year. We would be in groups of 3-4, with every group having someone who excelled in English being paired with 2-3 others who weren't so great. Our team leader would often help drag us along by helping us find the main idea in a passage, reviewing comma rules with us, or pointing out what themes the writer was trying to portray. As a logical thinker, I was not very good at reading between the lines to find deeper meanings that we're necessarily spelled out in the writing. My teacher realized that I was not the only one like this in our class, so she made sure to have a more creative thinker in our groups to help us out. I also think this helped me learn because I was more likely to ask my classmate a question than I was to ask my teacher. Having a group of friends that would roast each other at any chance we got typically led to not asking questions in class to avoid asking a dumb question. Having our team leader to ask questions to made it much easier to learn in her classroom. The second strategy she would use quite often was the community circle method. We typically did this any class period where we were supposed to read something the night before. If we were supposed to read a couple of chapters in a novel, or read a short story, we would always come into class, arrange our desks into a large circle, and she would facilitate discussion during the class period. This forced me to read because I was terrified that I would be called one to answer a question about the reading. More importantly, I was able to hear different ideas and views from my classmates about the reading. As I stated earlier, as a logical thinker, I never even thought about some of the theme and ideas that my classmates would bring up. So being able to sit and listen to multiple students discuss what they thought about a passage, helped me learn more about the passage than I would have ever gotten from just reading the story. The last strategy my teacher would use was graduated difficulty. I was not very good at English, however, I am very competitive. So when she would give us an assignment with level 1, level 2, or level 3 difficulty, I would always choose level 3 difficulty because I did not want my friends be able to do something that I couldn't. This led to me having to really focus and try much harder than I would if she would not have given us different options. Since I was working harder than I normally would, I learned much more during my senior year than I did most of my other English classes. At the time, I had no idea what my teacher was doing, but as I continue learning different strategies, I constantly see how hard she worked to use different strategies while teaching. Even though she had been teaching for well over 20 years, she still didn't depend on one single way of teaching, but she looked at our needs and adjusted her style accordingly.
3 Comments
6/13/2020 03:57:50 pm
Your first sentence immediately spurred thoughts in my mind. As a teacher, it is so incredibly difficult and time-consuming to be truly excellent. However, I don't want my students to remember me as a mediocre teacher, and I don't want them to look back on my English class and barely remember what they read or learned. As we reflect on what the great teachers who taught us did, I think it's important that we consider what students will remember about us 15 years in the future. If I am in the business of creating life-long learners, I want to ensure that I make my class memorable and engaging.
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6/14/2020 12:19:25 pm
Luke,
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6/14/2020 05:22:55 pm
Hello, Luke
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AuthorMy name is Luke Smith. I am a middle school Math teacher and a High School Soccer coach. Blog Roll Ashleigh Bowen Melanie Bryan Kathryn Bubrig Mara Chitic-Holmes Terry Cullum Lauren Delaune Kelly Hudson Lindsey Jones Rachel Long Jana Milsap Jonathan Mooneyham Nicole Musselwhite Daleana Phillips Melissa Queen Derrick Routon Amelia Watson ArchivesCategories |