Over
the past couple of years as a new teacher, I have attended a multitude of
professional development sessions for Teach for America and for the district,
as well as taken classes in the Education and Social Change program, and the
majority of these experiences have left me with little useful, concrete
knowledge to implement in my classroom. However, this class did not fall into
this category. For the first time as a Spanish teacher, I was able to use the
strategies and information that I learned.
First,
learning how to backwards plan a unit was very helpful. Teach for America had thrown
around the term “backwards planning” before, but they had never actually walked
us through the steps of how to do it. Having the literature and classroom discussion
to guide us helped me to design a unit plan that I was actually able to use in
my classroom with the novel that I was about to teach in my Spanish for Spanish
speakers class.
In
particular, the Smagorinsky reading on the different types of final assessments
helped me to think outside of the box in my unit planning. Rather than just
give my students a final exam on the content of novel, I had them prepare for
an analytic essay that was focused on the picaresque genre. Throughout our
reading of the novel Lazarillo de Tormes,
my students practiced finding and explaining quotes that illustrated the
characteristics of the picaresque genre so that by the time they got to the
final assessment, they were able to discuss at least three characteristics of
this genre and use textual evidence to support their claim. In this way,
students were less focused on remembering every detail of the novel’s events
and more focused on understanding the cultural and historical importance of the
novel in 16th century Spain and the precedence it set as the first
novel of this genre. Taking this “big picture” approach to my unit plan helped
me to accomplish one of my goals as a Spanish teacher, which was to teach
Spanish as a means of understanding the cultural context of the language.
In
addition to helping me restructure my planning process to help me reach my
instructional goals, this class helped me to make my lessons more
student-centered and therefore more engaging. Because I had to carefully design
lesson plans as part of my unit plan, I took the time to think of more
student-centered activities to include in them. For example, I started off the
unit by having students do a jigsaw and be the experts on one characteristic of
the picaresque novel that they would have to explain to the class. Rather than
spoon-feeding notes to the students, I had them work in groups to do their own
research using the study materials in the back of the book. Therefore, coming
up with the notes on the genre characteristics was a student-led process. Also,
many of my writing prompts throughout the reading of the novel involved student
choice. Students would often get a topic to write about but they would be able
to choose which scene or character to focus on. Making my class more
student-centered as a result of the readings and discussions we had in this
class made my overall experience as a teacher more enjoyable. I did more work
in the planning process but was more of a facilitator in the classroom, which
was a much more interesting role because I got to hear my students’ thoughts
more and learn about them as people.
Finally,
I feel that I learned more in this class than in other classes in the program
because of its structure. A lot of the classes we have taken thus far have been
very general in their content because we have students who teach various grade
levels and subjects. Being in small groups based on our content and grade level
helped us to hone in on the challenges that we face in our content at the high
school level and build more content-specific knowledge. In this setting, I feel
like I was able to learn from the professor and my colleagues about new
strategies that were applicable to my classroom. In addition, the more intimate
setting allowed for us to share more of our own ideas and teaching style with
our classmates. For example, when each of us presented an article or video
about an issue in education, I found myself thinking about factors that affect
my students that I had never examined in depth before. In addition, when we did
our lesson presentations, I was able to pick up ideas from other people that I
hadn’t used previously and that work well in a language classroom, like Whitney’s
use of a popular song to introduce a theme. Finally, I liked that our professor
had experience working in an ETO school because our discussions felt more
relevant to the setting in which we work. When an idea was brought up that
would be challenging to implement in the rigid structure of our schools, we
discussed how we could modify it to attempt to make it work. In this way, we
were constantly considering the realities of the environment in which we teach
rather than focusing on idealistic hypotheticals.
