AbilitiesOver my two years in the program, I have experienced the different needs of students on a daily basis. While it is very difficult to accommodate every single one of them, I have tried different things to make it so that students can learn.
Part of the differences in students' needs come from their personalities. The picture I have selected for the top of this page is of students from my 7th period class this year writing essays on the floor. This class is smaller, and they are often more productive when I allow them to work in positions that they find comfortable. Many students in this class are very good at collaborating with each other, so they benefit from this flexibility. Additionally, I have had several difficult classes to work with over these two years. Some of them have been difficult to work with mainly because they are so far behind grade level that they simply cannot keep up with the same lesson that may have worked with another class. For my most difficult class this year, I have needed to try new things often just to keep them either awake or sedentary. For instance, I pause-read more with this group than I do with the others. I will also switch from groups to individual work more often with them, or work with small groups while an inclusion teacher takes another. My more advanced students have impressed me, especially my honors class from my first year of teaching. I trusted them to collaborate with each other more than other classes and was occasionally able to skip material and move ahead and onto other things with that group. |
NeedsDuring my first year of teaching, I identified three things that I believed my students were most in need of, and I can still confirm these things today. These needs are as follows:
1. Academic Growth: My students are always expected to GROW, primarily in their test scores so that the school can improve its rating. While I see the importance of this, I believe that they need to grow in basic reading and reasoning skills first and foremost. In doing so, they will be become more prepared to handle grade-level work, which will in turn enable them to excel both at the tests they are expected to complete as well as at what they will be doing after their careers as students are over. 2. Need for Positive Attention: Although they do not really know how to ask for it, the students desire recognition and positive attention. I have especially seen this with the girls who put on a big show with their attitudes because they are not sure how else to be noticed and appreciated by others. I have handled this need occasionally with one-on-one conversations, or sometimes by responding to the situation with humor so that they can realize that their drama might not be as necessary as they thought in order to have a positive conversation with somebody. 3. Self-Confidence: As middle schoolers, my students are at an age where self-confidence is a very difficult thing to realize. This is a developmentally complicated thing anyway, and so this need surfaces even more in a struggling school and community. I enjoy when students tell me about goals they have, and when they have high hopes to achieve them. These goals range from wanting to be NBA and NFL stars to the students who actually have reasonable plans of how to get into college and obtain a career that they want. I have used these goals as reminders to the students in class sometimes in order to attach their work and academic goals to something that they truly care about. |
InterestsBecause I teach a state tested class, I find it very difficult to find resources that necessarily correlate with my students' interests, as well as the rigor of the state standards. This is unfortunate, because I would much prefer to teach passages that I know they will like instead of texts that have nothing to do with their lives at all. It is hard enough to find texts that line up with the standards, never mind finding a possibly irrelevant text and making it line up with both the standards and students' interests. However, my intervention class during my first year of teaching was been the part of the day where I had the most flexibility, and this is where I used some more creative sources.
During the month of February, ReadWorks posted several Black History Month articles on its website. I had used this site before to find passages, and the kids had asked me if they could read things for Black History Month. One day I brought in an article on Jackie Robinson which included a letter he wrote to the United States. I had recently brought in articles on presidents since Presidents' Day had been a week earlier, mostly because I am trying my hardest to help my students understand basic American history and geography at any chance I can get. This article made a bit of an impact on some of them. I pointed out how talented Robinson was at writing (and also how he was a gentleman and very polite), even though he is so well-known for being an athlete, and I tried to make the point that being a good writer is really important for everyone for reasons like this. The students were mostly caught up on how he wrote like that and found it hard to believe that he might actually have spoken as well as he wrote. It was an interesting experience. One time during my second year, I brought in a short passage on Emmett Till that I wanted to use kind of as an afterthought as the students finished up a standard before a quiz. I was delighted to see one student (who normally does nothing in my class) reading the passage before the bell even rang. They were all interested in reading it, and especially liked how we all had the same reaction to the story. |