Lessons Learned

This last Thursday I finished up my final segment of tutoring at a local middle school for TE302. Before we started tutoring, as mentioned in a previous post we did an exercise trying to understand and remember middle school. We were first asked to describe our own middle school experiences, then asked for a word to predict what the middle school kids would be like. For the second question my word was "unpredictable," mostly because I hadn't worked with middle school kids in a long time and didn't know what to expect. To be honest, I also used that word because I was playing it safe by choosing an ambiguous word. The word unpredictable can have many different meanings that are either positive or negative in bent; sometimes many meanings will be true at the same time. So, I'm writing today with some disambiguation of today's post title.

1. Getting students motivated can be hard, hard work. Maybe it's fair to say that I knew this already, but only in the abstract. Also bring everything that you know about to every student encounter, because you never know what part of your experience will interface with the experiences or interests of each student. Both of these are lessons about how to teach that I learned.
   
2. It's never too early to start thinking of ways to teach specific content. I was tutoring in math, and had a great but challenging time coming up with ways to make the most abstract of subjects engaging for kids. I remember a panel discussion by new teachers that I attended, where many of them talked about the amount of time they spent just trying to innovate in lesson planning because of the relentless pace of their classes. This, some would say, is the meat and potatoes of teaching, so I'm glad that I learned at least a couple of specific lesson outlines for getting kids to understand math.
3. The more interactive a learning community, the more interesting the result. We have had to post a tutoring log each day of tutoring that answers the questions "what, so what, now what" about something we did each day. On top of that, we had to respond to at least two of the logs of our classmates. This was a lot of writing. That's for sure why I haven't posted a blog entry since the first day of tutoring, and it was sometimes hard to find time to write the log entry for each day because I wanted to make an honest effort to think through an aspect of the day each time. The quick pace of the tutoring in the summer session (four days a week for three weeks) was intense in a good way, and I really value the opportunity to not just do my own reflecting but to peek inside the heads of my classmates as they worked through their tutoring time. Many of the comments that people would post on each others' work were words of encouragement and praise, and while I liked that I especially liked the opportunity for us to really start short dialogues with each other, to prod our thinking in new directions. I am frankly awed by the obvious facility with teaching and ease of engagement that some of my classmates demonstrated. I dare say that we all learned lessons about each other these last three weeks even without a single class period together and I'm looking forward to getting to see my classmates again.
4. Empathy in teaching is challenging and good. The tutoring plan that I'd created before the first day of tutoring was sort of like a philosophy of teaching statement, now that I think about it. I wrote about teaching as building bridges from what students know to what you want them to understand, in a shared conversational space built by both the student and the teacher. In an effort to reflect on my own analogy I said one of the flaws was that it left out my own intellectual location, presuming that I could work with students no matter where they were at. I'm glad I thought a little bit about that problem beforehand, because I wound up thinking about it quite a bit in the last three weeks. I think I had to build a lot of bridges of my own just to get from what I know (and how I know it) to what the students know and how they're thinking about things.
5. Writing about your own teaching can be educational even before anyone looks at it. In some ways, this statement is just about the benefit of reflecting on one's experience. I have been collecting information about my own teaching in the context of debate coaching for some months now, but I think that writing about teaching really forced me to organize my thoughts more productively than just remembering or even reviewing it. I've never been one for journaling in general (this blog is not a natural behavior for me if you are wondering), but in the last three weeks I've very much dug it. I hope that I can find time to keep a learning journal to continuously improve my future teaching practice.
   

I might go on I suppose, but I'll stick with those for now. Our class also read two books in the last two weeks, and I've been trying to think about what to write about those as well. Onward to classtime!