Section #1/Teaching Issues:The identified problems related to the lesson delivery seemed to be the need as the educator to provide what I would consider "foot holds" in the activity part of the lesson to continue propelling students foward. Upon reflection, a better strategy may have been to explicitly model the expectation (writing a letter to "Sarah" of "Sarah Plain & Tall") or provide a cloze letter that required students to choose words best suited for the blanks. Additionally, in hindsight, it would have helped to complete a simple graphic organizer before creating a draft of the letter.
Section #2/Second Language Acquisition:The activities that took place that were suited to the needs of ESL students in this particular class is the "read and respond read aloud" strategy that I use that continually requires students to respond to a constant stream of question and responses throughout the reading. Additionally, I stop frequently to explain and provide kinesthetic or visual representations of vocabulary that may be unfamiliar to my ESL students. For example: as we came accross the word "hitched" I had two students act as a wagon side-by-side and two students act as the horses in the story. I as "Papa" asked the students what was required to move the wagon. They instructed me to connect the horses to the wagon. After explaining that hitch can be the same as connect, students drew an illustration of a horse pulling a wagon in their vocabulary books.
Section #3/Ethnographic Perspectives: As the instructor, and from an ethnographic perspective need to better understand the backgrounds of my students. When discussing the 1800s on a previous day, I may the assumption that outhouses were a thing of the past. One of my students pointed out that a family member still used one in Mexico. I need to spend more time allowing students to share their connections to the material that will be discussed. I had a similar scenario occur earlier in the year when I read a book that involved people sleeping on straw floors. I was aware that some of my students slept on mattresses with no bed frames or directly on carpeted floors. However, I did not anticipate the response of a student explaining having to sleep on a dirt floor on a bed of straw. These children have some incredible life experiences to share and contribute to the culture of our classroom!
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I have done mission trips to both Mexico and Honduras within the last 3 years. I have witnessed all of these incidents. Most of the houses in the poorer districts where we worked had outhouses and dirt floors. They even had well or community watering holes where people washed their feet and then someone would drink from the same pool. Background experiences can be very different for our children, especially if they have spent parts of their lives in their native country.
ReplyDeleteExcellent reflection!
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for your perspective. I would love to travel some day as well to improve my own perspective when teaching in the classroom.
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