As far back as elementary school and even up through college I used to keep a mental list of teaching strategies that I liked and didn’t like. I observed my teachers carefully, knowing that I wanted to be one of them someday. I had this huge list in my head and always said how I should write it down before I actually got in front of a classroom. I never did, telling myself for years that I had plenty of time. Then one day, sans a hard copy, I was suddenly a teacher.
What that little anecdote tells me about myself is that I like to observe and try to get ideas by seeing what works and doesn’t work for others. I think that this holds true for my blogging experience thus far in this course as well.
As I read through my posts, the first thing I noticed was that I was always trying to figure out how I could use these ideas in my own classroom. Lots of ideas have been given in all our readings, from TEAPOD up through the Blau book, though plenty of them have been exemplified in college classrooms. This gives me the challenge of figuring them out how to “translate” the ideas from the college classroom to my classroom.
In that same vein, I also noticed that my posts are laced with doubt. Because so many of the ideas seem to be adapted for college classrooms, I worry about how my 9th graders would do with similar activities. I often doubt that their maturity (or lack thereof) will allow me to get very far with any of these lessons, though I was pleasantly surprised at how well they did with the exercise that was Blau-inspired last week (and they continue to do so!). In trying to figure out how to adapt these lessons, though, I am given the chance to practice working through difficulty, which has become another major theme in my blogs.
Working through difficulty is one of those things that had occurred to me before, but that I had never actually tried, and therefore never really encouraged my students to do. Since reading TEAPOD, it has been something that I have kept coming back to in my posts because I have found that much of our reading has expounded upon that first exposure to it.
The questioning that I do ties in with my aforementioned themes. I often question the reading and say “that would never work for me” and then think of the reasons why. This eventually led me to begin questioning my own questions, and I ended up with wonderful lessons :-)
I like that you are trying these activities in your classroom, even if they do appear to be geared toward the college classroom. And I like even better that some of these activities have been successful!
But you know it works the other way around too: some of the best teaching ideas I’ve had are adaptations of what any good elementary school teacher already knows.