The Keiki

I guess it's probably a good thing that I haven't had a lot of time to blog on here? The keiki have been keeping me pretty busy on this roller coaster ride that is first year teaching at a new school. We have gone through so much together so far, from establishing classroom norms and how to treat others to, "guys, come on, you know what you need to be doing right now" to  silent classes (days when I only speak to them through powerpoints because my voice is failing me or they need to calm down), to silent 10 second dance parties, to spontaneous walk and talks when I could tell that they needed to get out of their seats; this semester so far has been a learning experience that I have to say I am really enjoying. 

One quote that is really affecting my teaching practice right now goes something like 
"for 17 years we tell our kids to sit down, shut up, and then pick a career"

I feel like even in my very narrow, very limited professional development that I have been going through, there has to be more to education then producing obedient children. TFA puts a lot of emphasis on teaching us how to engage our students and to make them better humans but I want to know also how to get them to be more engaged. Middle schoolers especially need to interact, need to walk, to move, to be engaged, but why is it so hard to do that? Why am I so scared to have them do group work? Is it because I can't monitor them? Because I don't know exactly what they are doing? Yes and yes, but why should that be a problem. I am scared to do more group work and partner work because I feel that my students haven't gotten to the point where they realize why we are doing what we are doing and what effect it has on their learning. One of my big focuses this year has been on student ownership of learning and I feel that while I have gotten them to that point individually, when I put them in a group or partner setting, they begin to lose that and are more concerned with who did what at recess and why. I will expand on this more later but this is where I'm at so far.

 I, like many of my fellow first year TFA corps members, am already planning for next year and thinking about what I can do to make my class more engaging:

I know that I need to set up my classroom culture even more from the beginning. My team teacher and I (I teach the kids ELA/SS and she teaches them Math/ Science) put a lot of emphasis on setting up the procedures and rules that I let classroom culture fall by the wayside. My kids know how to enter silently, sit silently, work at a noise level 0 or 1, take out and put away laptops, raise their hands, but they don't know how to positively affirm others, why they shouldn't speak over their classmates, why they shouldn't talk out of turn, what being respectful looks like. They know what obedience looks like but they don't know why they need to be doing it, or what effect it has on our classroom culture. 

What I need to work on

• increasing students' desire to strive for the betterment of the classroom as a whole and not just themselves
• class ownership of classroom culture
• student understanding of each activity and each direction
• group work

What I think I'm strong at

• student ownership of work
• procedures/ being on task
• challenging the students
• partner work

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At the end of the day, it really is all for the keiki.