07/08/10
When asked what my professional passions are, I would like to say teaching but that is not always the case. I love teaching when I do it well and sometimes I do it very well. Other times not. When my students do not respond to a lesson, I try to reflect on which part of the lesson did not work or how I can enhance the lesson, or restructure the lesson next time. When my students do respond to a lesson, I try to reflect on what it was about the lesson that worked. Teaching is just as much a learning process for me as it is for my students. I am just a guide and the magic happens in the process.
My background is in film production and my favorite part of making movies was writing the script and editing the film. In essence, this is creating the story. I feel my goal in literature is that my students relate to the characters and the story first - that is the "hook". If they can relate to the characters and story they will read the book and have things to say about it.
Over the course of the last year, it has become painfully evident to me that my students learn differently than I did when I grew up. This illustrates the problem well:
The two last readings we have covered in class today and last night at home have been very inspiring in terms of my educational goals: "Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants" and the teaching observations described in Jere Brophy's "Teaching" publication. I would have to say that as a 70's child I am a digital immigrant and my own daughter and the students I teach are digial natives. Anyone who has seen a small child operate an iphone for the first time knows what I am talking about. Children who grew up in my time learned differently than the children I teach today and I need to find a way to appeal to their learning style. This brings up a lot of interesting questions. For example, is there a connection between the sudden rise of ADD and the sudden rise of multi-tasking and technology? Can I, as a digital immigrant, adapt my teaching strategies to better meet my digital-age kids?
I am very excited about all of this and so and here are my thoughts on the areas of content, structure, pedagogy and my own classroom:
Content:
As a literature teacher in the IB program I am required to teach my students how to analyze a book via a New Criticism approach. My students tend to connect to the works by relating to the characters in the works. This personal response to the works is invaluable to the process of appreciating and understanding literature, yet we have to cover a lot of material over a short amount of time as required by the IB. Rather than assuring that my students have read the works by asking pointed questions about content, I have two new ideas for how to run my class in the fall:
a) I want to start a Wiki in which my students post personal responses to the works in conjunction with the new criticism tools I am required to teach.
b) I want to keep a blog in which students update notes on what was covered in class that all can access.
Structure:
I intend to incorporate a separate Wiki for each of my classes. The pedagogical reason for this is that my students will have easy access to all the materials covered in class at all times. There can also be easy-access polls and missing or students will be better informed when they return to class. I also find that many of my students learn best using tools they are familiar with. In the age of Face Book, Twitter and You Tube, such tools and many others can enhance the classroom learning experience. They respond well to games and often timed exercises work well with teenagers. Stopwatch.com may enhance this experience. Most kids want to know what their classmates think about certain topics and for this we can use the Intel Visual Ranking Tool with the touch of a button. All of these tools have the potential to increase efficiency and focused learning.
Pedagogy:
I aspire to always be a teacher that is approachable, providing a safe and engaging environment in which my students can feel free to share work in progress (much like here at MSU in Rouen :) The outcome depends on the process and the process is organic and sometimes hard to define. What is exciting about this generation is that my students can easily incorporate new media in presentations and engage in interactive activities using online tools. I don't want to go too much in depth about how pedagogy and technology will merge in my classroom yet but I do know that I want to limit the programs I will use to a certain number of tools so that I will know these tools well and that I can use them efficiently in and out of the classroom.
My Classroom:
My school has limited technological resources but with the technologies we have learned here, I don't need fancy equipment. I will elaborate on this point in more detail at a later time.
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