Ongoing Reflection: Environment
This and the next two posts come from Rembert and Lydia's Best Practice Presentation in section 3. The two of us have had conversations over the past few months about ideas & concepts within teaching and learning that interest us. As we’ve been teaching we’ve also had real-life situations in which to examine those ideas in relation to actual students. Rembert and Lydia picked three broad themes from our conversations; we invite you to consider them for yourself and to add your own thoughts. We posed questions in class relating to each theme, and hope that you will now post your reflections to this blog so that we can all continue these conversations as we strive to develop disciplined habits of mind.
First theme: Environment
How do you plan lessons and activities that allow both student and teacher to actively process, discover, and evolve rather than transmit from some old, dead place?
How do you address your students’ vulnerabilities in the class—either physical, intellectual, or emotional?
posted by Lydia @ 4:22 PM
1 Comments:
For me the question of environment really evolved into thinking about safety. We know from psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and others who study human motivations, that people attend to their basic needs of food and shelter first, followed by their safety, and then the more rarified needs for emotional connection, intellectual stimulation and the like. So, learning will not happen where safety is lacking. In a school the spectrum will vary among students experiencing outright neglect at home, to bullying issues among peers, and to reluctance to speak or to do class assignments because of a history of harsh criticism, poor grades, and other forms of rejection.
To me the classroom space, somehow, is ideally imagined as a kind of protective environment like a fenced-in enclosure where students have freedom to run around, but they are enclosed, encircled and protected.
I think of the lesson plans like little discovery containers, there’s a structure, but freedom inside.
A lesson is a visible structure surrounding an open space. This is more than “scaffolding;”
it’s also protection from hurts such as too much personal inquiry, being held to rigid external standards, or being compared to others and inevitably found lacking.
On a personal level, I have taken time out to sit with students to simply talk to them about their thoughts on the class material, their reading, their day—to connect. I feel that my first priority in my interactions with students is to act like a human being. One student has experienced a lot of loss in her life recently, many are already very profoundly alienated from school by 8th grade. Some are bullies and others are bullied. This last is the most difficult for me to approach. As a student teacher it’s often inappropriate for me to step into my cooperating teacher’s management of her classroom and I feel frustrated. Often I don’t hear or don’t understand the social undercurrents happening among the students. I become befuddled and can’t tell who provoked whom, and feel like an 80-year-old, “What? What did you say? What’s that now..?” ineffectual at best.
Post a Comment
<< Home