Final Reflection

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 16^th 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.