Like Balancing Round Stones....

I decided to take my chances and look into some of the "suggested reading" for this course. I was pleasantly surprised by Gerald Duffy's Teaching and the Balancing of Round Stones. It was one of the most refreshing and exciting articles I have read in this program. I love how developed such an artful metaphore for teaching, and after reading his article I too am convinced that teaching is much like people trying to balance round stones. Too many of our articles are telling us what to think and exactly how to teach this or that. Duffy's insight that teachers become teachers becuase of the very fact that they are different is so refreshing.

Throughout this program I have been looked at like the black sheep, the "wild child" that is going to disrupt our schooling system. Duffy gives me hope -- hope that my "uniqueness" and my ability to think for myself is in fact a useful trait in teaching. I love how Duffy describes the many "balancing acts" that we as teachers are expected to accomplish. Society wants us to produce independant thinking democratic citizens. Yet, they want us to have perfectly orderly classrooms. Contradiction? Yes, but a great teacher is able to create the perfect balance in his or her classroom. Districts want us to teach every student to their individual needs, yet we are supposed to expect the world of them. Again, a teacher must produce the perfect balance.

I also love the question Duffy poses:

• What particular thing do you want to accomplish as a teacher?


• What indispensible message do you want to communicate to your students?


• What do you want your students to eventually become?

These questions really made me ponder why I am here and what i want to accomplish. It would take me days to come to even the slightest conclusion to these questions, but reading them has given me an entire new light on the next few months. I am excited to enter my student teaching with these in mind. What is one thing that really want to accomplish? What do I want my students to accomplish? What do I want my students to become? What a wonderful question! I want my students to be free thinkers. I want them to challenge everything and desire to learn as much as they possibly can. I want them to believe in themselves above all and to believe in eachother no matter what they wish to accomplish throughout their lives. They may not want to become lawyers and doctors and I want them to know that that is okay. I want them to be given the tools to explore the world and discover something that they are passonate about. I want them to love life and love learning!

Students, please take out your text books...

Shared reading and guided reading are two wonderful, yet very different teaching styles. I think that as a teacher the goal is to blend these two styles into your daily classroom routine as much as possible.

Shared reading is a great way to introduce students to a new genre. Last week in my main placement, my MT was introducing our students to Non-Fiction books. She used the document-camera to display the book on the screen for the class to see and read along. We have many ELL students in our class, so it was important for her to pick a text that was not too dificult. The lesson was focusing on the "features of non-fiction", not so much the information within the text. Under the docu-cam she displayed the full spread of the text, pointing out how the pictures are photographs, not drawings. She used "cognitive-apprenticeship" to "think out loud" while she read through the text and discovered that the photographs had "words under them that talk about the picture." She told the students that "readers call these words 'captions'."

Guided reading is equally as important, although much harder to execute in a classroom. My MT will sometimes have me work with a small reading group of similar level readers, but I find that there is little 'extra' time during the day to incorportate specialized reading groups. This is very unfortunate becuase students (especially the highest performers and lowest performers) gain SO much small group teaching. I think that it is mostly a classroom management issue, and like Routman explains, you have to let the class fend for itself unless it is an absolute emergency (which she has yet to see!). Yet, as a new teacher the idea of letting the students play "Lord of the Flies" for 20 minutes seems like a disaster waiting to happen. I have seen guided reading successfully executed in my Dyad placement. My teacher would set out the literacy centers once a week on Mondays. The centers rotated every 2 months and begin in October, so the excitement and level of engagement remains high among the kindergarteners. Students are assigned centers in pairs and the teacher is able to hold a meaningful conference with 4 to 5 students without interruption. She also requests parent volunteers to come in during this time, resulting in 2 Monday volunteers who are familar with the routine and extremely helpful.