Week 15

Last blog post reflection.Wow, time has really flown by! I cannot believe that I have only one more week left of student teaching. At the start of this placement, I did not expect to be so upset when it was done, but I am. I have really grown to love my teacher, paraprofessionals, and students. I will miss this.

This past week was a wonderful week. I learned a lot about what some of the challenges are that special education teachers face. My teacher has moved classrooms a lot since she has been hired in as a special education teacher. She also has had her fair share of paraprofessionals as well. I have learned how stressful it can be not knowing where you will be the upcoming year and who you will be working with. I also have had some good conversations with my teacher about what it is like to be a new teacher working with staff. I was able to hear about some of her challenges her first few years and get advice as to how to prepare for new school years and working with new staff.

Another thing I learned this week was how important it is for students to have community outings. We have many field trips and community outings for these students and it is sad to learn how little most of these families take their children out. This week I planned a trip to Walmart to look or needs and wants. I provided a list of items for a scavenger hunt in Walmart looking for things the students would need or want in a certain scenario. Each student was paired with a staff member and ran around the store looking for items. It was a good experience for my students to learn how to navigate the store, ask workers where items are located, and learn about different items in the store. They had a blast! We also had a chance to go to the zoo. At the zoo they learned how to take turns, wait in line, and learn the names of animals. We also talked about the needs and wants of various zoo animals. It was awesome to see them grown and enjoy their time!

What I hope to learn next week is what it is like for my students when they are pushed into the general education classes. I would like to follow them to some classes and see how they handle them. 

This week was great. My staff threw me a surprise wedding shower! How lucky am I? I feel so loved and blessed by them all! I hate that this is my last blog post and my last week ahead of me. I have so many mixed feelings, but I know that the people and the things I have learned will carry over into my new job in Florida. I cannot wait to see how God uses my experiences for his glory!

Week 14- Foundations Learning Outcome

Trinity encourages culture in the classroom. 

"Because our Mission in Christian higher education is not limited by ethnic or cultural differences, we consciously seek to develop a multiracial, multinational, and multi-denominational community." (Trinity Christian College mission statement)

This mission to have culture in the classroom is something that is well known at Trinity. I think in every education class that I have taken at Trinity, they have encouraged us to love diversity and encourage all cultures in the classroom.  "Here at Trinity, we promote diversity..." has been said numerous amounts of times over the course of my four years here. This concept is very important and I often find myself in classes thinking, "I love different cultures and I will of course promote diversity in the classroom." Although my heart has always been there, I  have found myself  wondering how I can use this concept of cultures in the classroom. I am a white, middle-class, monolingual-English speaker, who has been raised in a Dutch CRC community my whole life. Sure, I can buy the diverse books for my classroom library, suggested in my Children's Literature class and have a diversity day, but how can I know exactly how to use this concept in real life, in a real community without living it first?

To answer this question bluntly, you can't.

Field experiences opened my eyes to what it really meant to encourage cultures in the classroom. Many of the schools in this area have Polish-speaking students and Arabic-speaking students. This was a huge eye opener for a Dutch CRC girl. 

I found myself realizing that buying the diverse children's books and have a diversity day was just not going to cut it. 

The truth is: culture matters, but people are people.

What I mean by that, is that students want to you to show interest in them. They want to be loved and feel special. Getting to know my students interests was huge in my teaching and field experiences. 

This past semester Trinity opened up an opportunity for me to student teach at Rehoboth Christian School in Rehoboth, New Mexico. This was a huge culture shock for me. Majority of this schools population is made up native students from the Navajo and Zuni tribes. The exact percentage of natives in this school population is 70%. I taught 6th graders and I encountered many cultural differences and learned so much from the students. I had a few students who were not as understanding and were frustrated that this white girl from Chicago was going to be teaching them, but by the end of my time there I can honestly say that these same students were the ones who accepted me into their family and were bringing me native tea, foods, and sharing stories. Why? I showed interest in my students and their cultures. I asked questions and told them I wanted to learn more. Getting to know my students as people was the biggest and best way to encourage culture in the classroom.

The truth is: culture matters, but people are people.

I honestly do not think I would have been able to understand exactly how to encourage culture in the classroom, like Trinity suggests unless I had been able to live it out in my field experiences. I learned the absolute most from Trinity through the experiences they were able to provide me outside of lectures and classes,. I learned the most in real classrooms and in real schools. For that I am grateful.

The concept of encouraging cultures and diversity was such a different experience for me, when I actually was given the chance to practice it in real life experiences. 

Week 13

This week was my first week of full time teaching at this placement. It wen very well! Full time at this placement entails me teaching group, all 7 reading centers, and being in charge of the classroom in terms of where the paraprofessionals are going and what they are doing and the schedule for the day.

This week I taught two group lessons about "needs and wants". I used two different reading materials in order to help teach the students what a need is and what a want is. The book took us through different scenarios such as, "Jack has holes in his socks. He wants to buy a video game, but what do you think he needs? SOCKS!" This booklet was quite helpful for the students to have practice identifying needs and wants. I also did a SmartBoard activity where they had to circle the pictures that were needs and cross off the pictures that are wants. In addition to this, this week I taught reading centers to all seven students and came up with new ways of reaching their goals.

This week I learned that being the teacher role can be uncomfortable at times. I felt uncomfortable telling my paraprofessionals what to do during the day. The only thing that made it work okay was that my paraprofessionals like me and we have good rapport. They would tease me about my new role and call me "teacher". We laughed together about this new role and they encouraged me through it. I learned how important it really is to build that rapport as a teacher with your paraprofessionals. Another thing I learned was to never underestimate your student's abilities. The Speech Pathologist brought in the game headbands for the students to play. How this game works is the students strap a picture of an item to their forehead and the other students use describing words to help the student to guess what picture is strapped to his/her head. We brought in "peer buddies", who are 5th grade general education students from the school to come and play the game with them to model the game and behaviors. It went AWESOME! The students picked up on the game quickly and were using amazing describing words. The next day I was working with a student who always has difficulties with generalization in my reading center. This students goal is to be able to describe items. He loved the game headbands, so I bent the picture cards and put it on my forehead and had him play the game with me. It was basically the same thing we had been doing, but I had the picture on my head and we called it a game. The student did AMAZING! This was an awesome teaching moment for me!

Next week I hope to learn more about the various roles of my PT, OT, and Speech Pathologist. They come in teach week to our classroom and spend time with students. I want to watch them work with the students to learn more about how to best teach my students at the reading center. This week, I noticed that one of my students says the "s" sound whenever she needs to say the "sh" sound. I talked with the Speech Pathologist and I hope to learn what she is working on and transfer the same instruction to this student in my reading center.

Next week I will be full time again and I am planning my own field trip (community outing) with the students to practice "needs vs wants" in the community. I am excited to have the opportunity to plan my own field trip!