Step 10: It takes village

Please excuse the short post this week: our classes as well as our first student teaching placements wrap up next week, and this Friday is the deadline for my Term III lesson design and analysis project. Yikes! I am up to my ears in notes, artifacts, and emotions regarding the small group lessons I taught, and I am now trying to reflect on them in order to take lessons from both the good and the bad aspects of these attempts into my future teaching.

Amidst this grad school work, I have continued to find tremendous value in the time I spend at my placement. In addition to my work with the kids, I’m also learning from the interactions between my classroom mentor and the parents.  Last week I had the opportunity to participate in parent-teacher conferences, and this experience helped me develop a greater appreciation of the role that a teacher gets to play in a child’s “village”. Throughout the term I have really admired the way that my classroom mentor has interacted with parents with both respect and frankness. She even invited parents on two occasions to come into the classroom to watch how she supports their children in learning to read. Many eagerly attended, hungry for strategies they could use at home, and she gave them tips such as how to make read-alouds more purposeful.  Similarly, at last week’s conferences I witnessed collaborative conversations about how to best support children. I have to admit I was a bit nervous about how some of the conferences would go, particularly those with parents of kids who are not doing well academically; but it was actually really nice to see how these parents did not get indignant or defensive - instead they were genuinely interested in how they could help their students do better. I appreciated how my mentor spoke with the parents (and even the students who often accompanied them) honestly, but also gently.  She emphasized student progress and seemed to truly believe that these students could continue to improve even if they’re not passing right now. It still does not quite sit right with me that, within our current system, many teachers must assign letter grades to children as young as my first graders; but if grades must exist, I would prefer they be spoken about as temporary indications of progress, rather than ultimate labels of a student’s ability.