I've been thinking a lot about teachers and what makes them think whether a child is a failure or not. Shouldn't the question for them be, "Have I failed a child today?" Does failure occur when a student doesn't pass a standardized test or is it when a student doesn't go beyond what you know they are capable of, yet they stay at grade level, so it's OK?
For some reason these are things I began to think about when reading Regie Routman this week. I loved how she said that, "raised expectations mean that students learn what it means to explore writing in depth" (p54). I think this would go for any subject if a teacher gave high expectations in it and to their students by asking them to explore more. No matter where a student lives, has advantages or disadvantages, they don't need different instruction, they just need more good instruction, high expectations, and support from their teachers.
Literacy is a lifelong skill so by having higher expectations and getting students to "explain their thinking" can only make a student more successful. Yes, Routman uses all of her examples in literacy (writing), but it really does work for everything else too. She continues that, "unless we spend lots of time doing the task with them" (p.76), students will not only master the skills but become confident in them and then become an independent learner.
So share! Share your work, share your ideas and most important share your own failures. this in turn will gain your learners trust which is the most important thing you can do. If you can accomplish that, then you haven't failed a child.
This is something my dyad teacher does. He is an amazing teacher!! Every student in his class is important, every student feels important and every student knows it and believes it! He is truly developing strong readers, writers and mathematicians. He allows a student to voice an opinion and to know that what they say has been acknowledged.
When it comes to reading and writing, he never uses the "usual" writing prompts. His prompts usually go with a book that they are reading together. He gets them excited for the book and the writing. This past week after reading the beginning passages of "How to Eat Fried Worms" he got the class into a great conversation about whether they have ever been dared to do something or not? He listened to all of them as they shared an experienced. The next day the writing prompt was on the board, "have you ever been dared to do something? Well I have. Let me tell you about it". These students were so excited to begin to write that I honestly don't think they even realized that they were doing an assignment!
So, yes, get students excited, get them to share their everyday happenings and get them to want to learn by expecting great things from them!
The other thing I was thinking about during this weeks readings in Fox were phonics and vowels. I still struggle with an ELL student being able to "hear" the correct sound when they are unable to pronounce it correctly. I sat with 4 students in my main placement where my job was to teach them their vowel sounds. All students, while speaking English well, only a slight accent, still had trouble hearing the short "e", "a" if they said the word. However, if I said the word they understood. Just something to think about when working with students who speak a different language, a 2nd language or has an accent.
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