Meeting Standard Four ~ Classroom Practice

The student teacher exhibits confident control over a variety of approaches to classroom pedagogy. In direct presentations, s/he demonstrates sensitivity to pacing, timing, amount and sequencing of material, and form of presentations, as well as inviting student contributions and interactions. Questioning strategies are thoughtful, considering a range and arc of questions that develop logically from simple to complex. Group work is used effectively and students are carefully coached on the purpose and strategies for collaboration. Work required of students clearly reinforces basic skills (reading, writing, note-taking, oral presentation, listening) and builds toward more complex mastery (critical thinking, problem-solving, analysis, and synthesis). Technology skills are incorporated into lessons as frequently as possible, with the student teacher modeling the use of technology whenever possible.

The ability to ask students important and critical questions is a privilege I don’t take lightly as an educator.  Young people have such brilliant things to say, but often are not given the opportunities to speak up.  This semester I gave students the opportunity to construct knowledge around the institution of slavery using a variety of approaches.  Before we could dive into our primary text, students needed to build context around the African slave trade.  To do this, students completed a map exercise from a textbook and then students constructed their own maps.  I crafted a description of all the things their maps would need and created a sample map.  I then divided students into (mostly) pairs, explained the instructions and gave them the materials.  The project took up a lot of time, but the products turned out really well.  I think it was beyond important for students to construct these maps so that they had this context of the Middle Passage before we actually read about it.  The maps challenged students to engage their visual/spatial intelligence and gave students space to be artistic (Artifact One).

We then dived into our primary text To Be a Slave.  In order to have students engage with this historical text (the book was a collection of slave narratives that had been organized into a children’s book), students mostly answered comprehension questions in a special journal (Artifact Two). The comprehension questions were part of regularly assigned journal assignments that included vocabulary and gave students the opportunity to come up with discussion questions to raise in class.  These journal assignments were assigned such that we’d have enough time to go over them in class and have an assessment on each chapter of the book.  The journal was instrumental to allowing students to work through the book and practice their reading and writing skills regularly.  In class, we went over the comprehension questions and usually discussed either one or a couple of discussion questions. 

While the majority of my teaching did revolve around engaging students with the primary text, I also wanted to find ways to fold in additional historical context around relevant topics.  I created a stations activity to have students learn a bit more about Thomas Jefferson, how slavery influenced burgeoning social class stratification, and the connection between slavery and the cotton enterprise (Artifact Three).  I felt like students were doing enough reading, so I sought out visual texts that were all in the form of educational videos on YouTube. I developed comprehension questions around these texts and then came up with a “deeper” (read: higher order) question for each text so that students got to think deeply about an issue central to the text. Students completed the station work in the same journals and worked collaboratively in groups.