Learning Outcome 4: Understand how students learn and develop
Students’ minds are fascinating things to behold. They are constantly developing their personal identity and figuring out how they want to interact with peers, adults, language and the world around them. They find themselves at important and difficult cross roads each day, multiple times a day. They are beginning to arm themselves with the skills that they will use for potentially the rest of their lives. I found that by tapping into this building process of students’ lives I was able to help them on their roads of inquiry and understanding.
What I found was most interesting in both of my placements was how these students interacted with language. I have been placed in Central Islip Senior High School and Central Islip Ralph G Reed Middle School. This school district is comprised of a demographic that is mostly minorities, predominantly African American and Hispanic. Many of these students speak more than one language, be that Spanish or Haitian. Communicating in English is something that many people take for granted, and can be the biggest hurdle for many students. I found it most important to access students where they were and then bring them to the level that I know they can reach. By meeting their needs for language, through differentiation in instruction or one on one conferencing, students build their skills and their confidence making them more likely to want to learn. This helps them gain the skills to succeed in all other subject areas too.
I also found it important to have students question the language that they used. Having them answer the question of why they used the words they used often put their thought process under the microscope. They would begin to pick apart how they interact with language and the origin of that interaction. When they would verbalize their reasoning, it gave me further insight into who they were as a member of their community, a learner and how I can best help them on their journey to becoming whomever they were going to be. This analysis of language came into play when I began a unit on Huck Finn and the use of the word “nigger”. Many of my students used a form of this word in their everyday interactions with peers. Instead of avoiding this part of the text, I decided to shine a spot light on it by asking students what their thoughts were. Why was the word used in the text? Why was it considered taboo? What was the meaning of the word when the book was first published, how has it changed? How do you interact with the word? By picking apart all of these questions, students gained new insight into the history of this type of language, the denotation and connotation of the word and how their peers felt about this word. I was even able to learn from my students how they interacted with language and why they interacted in that way. It was often through discussions that I learned the most from my students on how they were developing and learning.
Discussions like the one mentioned helped open doors and created launch pads for students to rocket off of. In that discussion alone students were asked to consider the history of the word, what people used it and what people it was directed toward. This type of analysis helps students unpack language and gain a better understanding of the words they are using. With a unit like this, I can access their prior knowledge of history while working with their history teachers to develop dual units. Immersion is one of the most effective ways to aid learning. If students are able to see the connections between classes not only in subject matter but in skills needed, then they will want to continue to discover the connections.
In both of my placements, I found that discussions were one of the easiest ways to tap into students learning. These discussions were based on reading comprehension, listening comprehension, reactions to images, videos and their own reactions. I understand that there are all types of learners in my classroom at any given time, and that discussion based learning is not a welcoming environment for all students, but I believe that it opens the door to learning. Discussions can take various forms, be that whole class, group, or pairings with peers and one on one conversations with myself. By getting students to express their ideas, understandings, and discourses in one forum, the skills they used will transfer to other forums.