Pedagogy
Over the course of this internship, my teaching philosophy has changed from “how can I get them to know what I want them to know?” to “how can I show them I believe they can achieve everything they want to?”
I teach the way I do to allow students to find the confidence within themselves to learn, do well, and be motivated to learn on their own down the line. My thinking about teaching used to be focused on achievement- are students on track for where they need to be according to state standards? Did X student learn this principle in class today? What percentage will pass this test? Over the course of this internship, my thinking has evolved to consider the long term development of the child. I have seen that the child’s relationship with learning and their self-confidence (each inseparable from the other, I think) are by far the most important things to develop in order to pave the way for further success. This is especially true with students that come to Teton Literacy Center more than 6 months behind grade level in reading and writing.
This is Fernando, a tutoring student at TLC. After struggling to engage him in reading comprehension exercises, I tried using his interests in humor and performance art to drive an exploration activity: acting out poetry. Watch his enthusiasm skyrocket!
Experience-based learning
This is Alexandra, a student in a Kindergarten Enrichment club at Jackson Elementary School. After a group discussion on habitat, she is using anything from shoe boxes, toilet paper rolls, and egg cartons to create the ideal dinosaur habitat. With little prompting, she included everything a dinosaur needs to be happy and healthy. She couldn't wait to take it home to show her family.
As a program intern with TLC, I've had the space and freedom to experiment with experience-based lesson plans in a few different settings. After-school enrichment programming is a good environment to try out more play-based learning activities, while tutoring lesson plans call for exploration with more rigorous and specific learning objectives. Planning lessons for Latino Outdoors participants duting my capacity building project was great experience molding a lesson for a multi-age, multi-language audience.
A method of teaching I've developed in this internship is project-based learning. I use this method in both after-school clubs in the experiential science education curricula I've designed and in tutoring lesson plans for literacy-based outcomes. In both cases, students are given a chance to interact with the subject matter on their own terms with a minimum of instruction from me (or their tutor) beforehand. In this way, they can explore what interests them, use their own curiousity as a guide, and have meaningful learning experiences. I believe that giving students the autonomy to explore greatly enhances feelings of empowerment and intrinsic motivation to achieve and discover. In future classrooms, indoors and out, I feel prepared to build on this practice as a way to critically engage young learners.
Educator Growth
Perhaps the biggest growth experience throughout this internship was teaching Late Night Literacy. This is a student group aged 6-12 that comes to TLC from 5:30-7pm while their parents are in English class. In many cases, students have had a long day of school, after-school clubs, and tutoring sessions before coming in to this class. By the time they walk through the door, they're tired, unmotivated, and primed for poor behavior. For the first few weeks, I tried to strong-arm my way through reading and writing activities. These usually went badly- once a student ended up crying under a table. However, I began to figure out that there were ways to engage these students through hands-on activities with a backed-off approach to literacy. As I got to know them and they became more comfortable with me, our time together in the evenings took a far more productive and enjoyable turn.
With time, I found that hands-on literacy activities were the most effective and engaging strategies for the multi-age Late Night Literacy group. Here's Jair posing with his "Winter Warriors" character poster. We brainstormed strengths and weaknesses for each one, then had a tournament to see who's was the fiercest warrior of all!
This is Jordy, a first (?) grader in the Late Night Literacy class. He's a tricky student to engage, and I used to find myself giving up on him for being disruptive. As it turned out, he responds incredibly well to individualized challenges, especially having to do with building, and a little extra encouragement. He loves to create anything to do with Transformers, which he's done here in a picket sign activity.
Thank you, Young Authors of Teton County School District, for improving my science literacy:
