Reflections
Appreciation of Many Personalities
Throughout this Learning Inquiry Experience, I have learned the importance of many personality types, and appreciate different personalities for what they offer. Prior to this experience, I found students who were constantly squirming on the carpet, chatty students, and the students that dominate conversations difficult to teach. Now, I see how helpful and necessary these students are in a community.
In general, my busy bodies need to move, so they are the students who frequently pick up the classroom and help me with errands I need to run to other teacher's rooms and the office. My chatty students now help me encourage the non-chatty students to participate. I have found that while these encouragements used to happen only in the classroom, they transferred to the playground, and formed new playgroups. My dominant students have learned the importance of patience, but are always there for me when other students are unwilling or too intimidated to speak, and I appreciate them for that.
Classroom Management
As a professional, I have grown from relying on my Master Teacher to becoming a confident Teacher capable of managing my own classroom. I have learned the importance of being firm, yet caring and demanding, yet understanding of needs. I am able to hold my students to their personal best standards, and have learned how to differentiate lessons based on needs. I have also learned how to manage a classroom when distracting behavior occurs, without ruining a lesson and leading the whole class to a distraction they aren’t able to recover from. I grew as a professional in the ways I talk to my students, and the professional relationships I was able to build with them.
Additionally, and building off of the significance of differentiated motivation strategies, I have grown in my learning of how to shift motivation from extrinsic to intrinsic. I have now seen students’ transition from extreme excitement about brownies to extreme excitement about feeling appreciated, and hope to foster the intrinsic feelings more for my future learners. Understanding that students develop and respond differently to different motivators, I will continue to grow in this area and help all of my students rely less on extrinsic and more on intrinsic positivity.
Respectful Students
One of the reflections I am most proud of is the respect I see the students have towards both one another and their teachers. Respect is one of those life skills that I find very important, and was also something I did not see an abundance of when I first began teaching in this classroom. Students were taking things from one another, breaking the teachers supplies, pushing and hurting each other and talking when the teachers or other students were talking. The lack of respect the students showed was one of the biggest factors in leading me to work on community building.
At the end of the project, I was so proud of the respectful young learners in our learning community. Overtime, the students grasped our golden rule “treat others how you want to be treated” and it showed. The students were polite to one another, helping each other solve problems, and appreciating the help the received. For the most part, the students understood other peoples rights to learn, and respected the different learning times and styles of their classmates. Other teachers even commented on how respectful some of our students were in their classrooms. Reflecting back on receiving complements about my respectful students, all of the hard work was worth it.
Impact on Future Teaching
In my future teaching, I will begin each year with the establishment of a safe-learning environment, and will continue to grow and learn about modern research that can help. In the literature I read, many elements can help to establish a safe community, and I only started with a few during this Inquiry Project. In my future classrooms, I will challenge myself to implement the most needed and useful elements. I now understand how different the needs of different classes and students can be, and the best way to learn about and address those needs is through trying new things. I look forward to implementing what I have already learned as well as furthering my learning, while striving to make all of my classes as safe and productive as can be.
Throughout this Learning Inquiry Experience, I have learned the importance of many personality types, and appreciate different personalities for what they offer. Prior to this experience, I found students who were constantly squirming on the carpet, chatty students, and the students that dominate conversations difficult to teach. Now, I see how helpful and necessary these students are in a community.
In general, my busy bodies need to move, so they are the students who frequently pick up the classroom and help me with errands I need to run to other teacher's rooms and the office. My chatty students now help me encourage the non-chatty students to participate. I have found that while these encouragements used to happen only in the classroom, they transferred to the playground, and formed new playgroups. My dominant students have learned the importance of patience, but are always there for me when other students are unwilling or too intimidated to speak, and I appreciate them for that.
Classroom Management
As a professional, I have grown from relying on my Master Teacher to becoming a confident Teacher capable of managing my own classroom. I have learned the importance of being firm, yet caring and demanding, yet understanding of needs. I am able to hold my students to their personal best standards, and have learned how to differentiate lessons based on needs. I have also learned how to manage a classroom when distracting behavior occurs, without ruining a lesson and leading the whole class to a distraction they aren’t able to recover from. I grew as a professional in the ways I talk to my students, and the professional relationships I was able to build with them.
Additionally, and building off of the significance of differentiated motivation strategies, I have grown in my learning of how to shift motivation from extrinsic to intrinsic. I have now seen students’ transition from extreme excitement about brownies to extreme excitement about feeling appreciated, and hope to foster the intrinsic feelings more for my future learners. Understanding that students develop and respond differently to different motivators, I will continue to grow in this area and help all of my students rely less on extrinsic and more on intrinsic positivity.
Respectful Students
One of the reflections I am most proud of is the respect I see the students have towards both one another and their teachers. Respect is one of those life skills that I find very important, and was also something I did not see an abundance of when I first began teaching in this classroom. Students were taking things from one another, breaking the teachers supplies, pushing and hurting each other and talking when the teachers or other students were talking. The lack of respect the students showed was one of the biggest factors in leading me to work on community building.
At the end of the project, I was so proud of the respectful young learners in our learning community. Overtime, the students grasped our golden rule “treat others how you want to be treated” and it showed. The students were polite to one another, helping each other solve problems, and appreciating the help the received. For the most part, the students understood other peoples rights to learn, and respected the different learning times and styles of their classmates. Other teachers even commented on how respectful some of our students were in their classrooms. Reflecting back on receiving complements about my respectful students, all of the hard work was worth it.
Impact on Future Teaching
In my future teaching, I will begin each year with the establishment of a safe-learning environment, and will continue to grow and learn about modern research that can help. In the literature I read, many elements can help to establish a safe community, and I only started with a few during this Inquiry Project. In my future classrooms, I will challenge myself to implement the most needed and useful elements. I now understand how different the needs of different classes and students can be, and the best way to learn about and address those needs is through trying new things. I look forward to implementing what I have already learned as well as furthering my learning, while striving to make all of my classes as safe and productive as can be.