The Teaching Literature to
Adolescents class has been an amazing experience. To begin, I want to
acknowledge what a great job Dr. Sean Agriss did teaching this course. I
believe a major reason it was so great is because he is skilled at connecting
and interacting with the students and he does great at making the material
engaging and holding our interest. Along with that, the classmates I had made
for a wonderful experience as well. Everyone brought a unique experience and
everyone offered great thoughts and arguments when discussing the material we
were learning. So, to everyone in the class, I appreciate all your hard work
and contributions to the class that made for an excellent learning experience.
I
learned a lot through my own personal work in this class. While it is true that
nothing can replicate the experience of teaching in your own classroom, the
projects and work in this class taught me things about myself that I will be
aware of and utilize in the future. My book talk, for which I did George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four, made me see
instantly that I need to prepare myself as best as possible. This should be
obvious, but there is a big difference between trying to prepare and actually
being prepared. I created my plan for the book talk, went over it a bit, and
then set it aside until it was time to do the book talk. I just thought it
would be really easy because I was talking about something I know and was
interested in. This turned out to be completely untrue: when it came time to
present, I felt awkward and uncomfortable.
The
book talk experience became my basis for my attitude regarding my mini-lesson,
for which I taught Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Determined not to repeat
the mistakes I made with the book talk, I decided to quickly pick my story and plan
a lesson. I started by planning a fifty minute lesson for the story; I included
an audio recording version of the story to be played, similar to what had been
done for my class when I was a high school student. From there, the lesson
essentially played out like I had done in class. For the mini-lesson, I removed
the first thirty minutes planned in the lesson and adapted the last twenty to
stand on its own. I found this to be an easy way to be in full control of my
planning. Once I had it planned, I made sure to practice the lesson; I used my
girlfriend as a student and had her participate in the lesson. I bought
supplies and prepared everything I needed, and having her to test it out went
great. I was supposed to give my lesson the day after the wind storm, but
school was cancelled; I instead used that extra time for more practice and fine
tuning what I planned to say to the class. Fortunately, this all paid off. I
felt extremely comfortable when giving the lesson and I felt that the lesson
went very smooth.
Moving
onto the unit plan that was a beast to deal with. I am glad that Dr. Agriss
embedded due dates for pieces of the unit, otherwise I definitely would have
ended up trying to do the whole thing in the last week. But this also made me
realize that to truly plan out these lessons well, I needed that given time.
This was my first time planning lessons, and because of that, I had no idea what
my pace would be. Unfortunately, I put off the majority of the lesson plans
till last minute anyway. It was extremely difficult to create them all in a
short time. Now I know I need to better plan and space out my lesson planning.
For example, if I had created (or at least attempted) two lesson plans a week,
I would have had them done early and maybe just needed to touch them up with
new ideas or strategies I learned throughout the quarter. This would have been
much more beneficial to me and the end product.
Of
course, those products are not the only lessons I learned this quarter. Most of
what I got from this class involved getting students engaged in the material,
which is one of the most important, and difficult, aspects. The material we
were given at the beginning of the course offered great insight into strategies
for and theories on teaching. The chapter titled “Assessing and Evaluating
Students’ Learning” offered great ideas to assess students other than a typical
objective, selection-answer test. For example, we can have our students do blog
or journal entries to respond to the lessons (like we did) in order to allow
them to freely speak their mind without necessarily having immediate student
feedback. This can alleviate fear of speaking in class. On the subject of
writing, students can also produce a variety of essays that will offer insight
into their learning. This chapter, as well as other authors, emphasize the
importance of classroom discussion. Classroom discussion is crucial to creating
critical thinking in the classroom and giving everyone a voice. When classroom
discussion is had, students are able to learn from each other and the teacher
is able to learn more than if the teacher just lectures the whole time.
Offering many points of view is crucial in education. Another article I found
profound was “Critical Pedagogy and Popular Culture in an Urban Secondary
English Classroom.” I have always thought that the idea of using popular
culture to engage students would be a good idea; I love that I have a reference
to back that up. I always found it useful for me in my educational experience,
and I agree that is allows students to connect to the material much better.
As a
whole, I got a lot out of taking this class. I found it great that Dr. Agriss
provided the edTPA lesson plan template from the beginning. I was able to look
at it from the beginning of the quarter. I also took Foundations of Classroom
Assessment this quarter, in which we looked at steps one through nine as a
class. By the time we were doing that, I already had experience with the
template. Furthermore, at the end of the quarter we were instructed to create a
full lesson plan without instruction on pieces ten through fourteen.
Fortunately, thanks to working on the unit plan for ENGL493, I was prepared and
practiced in making lesson plans and was able to fairly easily design a lesson
for my Assessment class. Similarly, I learned about standards-based grading
through the ENGL493 class. I am interested in this idea and will be looking
into it more as I got forward in my studies. I want to see if it would be a
better method for my classroom that other methods currently employed by many
teachers. Overall, the many things I learned in this class have already begun
to affect how I view teaching and how I plan to teach. For that, I am
appreciative and grateful for an overall education, useful, and fun experience.
