Meeting Standard Two ~ Student as Learner

The student teacher demonstrates an awareness of, and concern for, the people in his/her classroom. Focusing on learners as full human beings with a rich history, unique characteristics, substantive achievements, talents, skills and interests, the student teacher does his/her best to observe, document and learn about those students. S/he works hard to "understand their understanding."

One of the tasks educators have is not just to deliver material in a vacuum and hope that it sticks with students, but rather to be constantly tweaking and adjusting material so that it is both accessible and engaging to students.  As a precursor to this, educators must constantly collect data on their students both formally and informally.  Knowing who is in your classroom must be a guiding principle to any teaching practice. 

Right before BSHS began, my co-teacher and I were given a roster of all of our students and a list of students who had reported medical conditions.  Medical conditions ranged from allergies to being prone to non-epileptic seizures.  I personally didn’t know what do to with the information because I hadn’t met my students yet.  Even if a student had ADHD or ADD, which some students did, I didn’t know what that would look like for that student at that point.  Thus, my co-teacher and I thought it more apt to have students report any information they wanted us to know themselves.  On the first day of class, we distributed a survey to gain some preliminary information on students in a more personal way (Artifact One). Midway through the semester we distributed another survey to check in on how students were doing and if they wanted to see any different before the end of the semester (Artifact Two).  Having these mechanisms of student feedback were especially important to student voice and our conversation around student rights which was relevant to our conversations about social movements. 

On the second day of class we had students fill out identity maps (Artifact Three).  We also participated in the activity and shared this with students.  Both the identity maps and the surveys we collected were formal methods of collecting background information about our students.  But we also collected data more informally throughout the semester by paying attention to how students responded to different assignments and activities.   I was very concerned with using the data we collected on students to construct activities that connected with students’ interests and catered to their learning styles.  This was definitely something I worked on continuously almost every day of the summer.