Stories from the Field: Week 1

For my first day of field placement, I was placed in Mrs. Kot’s 7th grade class. I mostly spent the first two classes observing. The other student with me and I hung back for this class, as Mrs. Kot gave a lesson about “influences”. I noticed how she moved around the whole room as she talked, taking moments to ask different students how they felt they influence other people, and how other people influence them. Then they started an activity where she grouped people up and gave them each a question to answer following these themes. I noticed here how she built up a feeling of community. Nobody was singled out away from everyone, everyone had a place to say an answer. One thing that surprised me was how fine every student was. When being grouped off I didn’t hear any complaints about someone being in a group they didn’t want to be in, and I think that’s because the environment the teacher made was one where everyone felt invited and engaging with everyone else. The next class the students had was with Madam Duran, their French teacher. I mostly observed again for this class, since these kids spoke better French than me. One thing I noticed here was that the teacher kind of made a competition out of the lesson that made the class very engaged in the assignment. Finally, last class was English, or Literacy. Mrs. Kot once again explained the goal of the class very concisely while asking for input from students to get their minds working. The students had read a book prior to class and the assignment was about how the students would change it, why they would recommend it to a friend, ect. This class I finally went around and worked with them. I mostly just moved around the room seeing which kids where struggling to get something down on the paper, and talked to them about what they might have found interesting about the book. This is something the teacher also did. I just let them speak out loud, for example, how changing the ending of the book would change how the characters feel about each other and things like that. It helped them get a baseline of what they wanted to write. I could tell the teacher had been working like this for a while, as all the kids were very open to talking to us and letting us help them with their work. I think it make an environment where everyone is more comfortable. With students being comfortable in the classroom, it lets the students be more creative and more interested in learning than it would otherwise be.