Yvonne's Tips For Teacher Blog

Yvonne's Tips For Teacher Blog

Monday, July 19, 2021

Post 485: The Courage To Teach Chapter 6

 

 

Post 485: The Courage To Teach Chapter 6

In this chapter, not only do teachers depend on their students to learn and grow, faculty also depend on each other for feedback for growth.  When I take a Faculty Development class, my favorite part of the class is interacting with other faculty and learning best teaching practices from them. Even after teaching 25 years, I always learn something from other faculty. I also like to socialize with other faculty since teaching online can be isolating when it is just you, your computer and the students.  Online teaching does not lend itself readily to interactions with other teachers outside of professional development or faculty development classes. Palmer encourages faculty talk to each other to learn and grow from each other. We form a 'faculty club' to learn from each other. Palmer states "If we want to grow in our practice, we have two primary places to go: in the inner ground from which good teaching comes from and to the community of fellow teachers from whom we can learn more about ourselves and our craft." (Palmer, 146)

Palmer continues, "The growth of any craft depends on shared practice and honest dialogue among people who do it. We grow by private trial and error to be sure--but our willingness to try, and fail, as individuals is severely limited when we are not supported by a community that encourages such risks." (Palmer, 148)

When I take classes, I learn new ways to see the many different facets of teaching. When I try out a new way to teach a topic, it is really nice to have the support of the boss. It is nice to be able to have an honest dialogue with other faculty and with the boss to try out new ways to teach a topic, or new ways to make a topic more compelling or engaging to students. It is only through such honest dialogue back and forth without fear of recrimination that we as professionals can truly learn and grow. Palmer says we should form a 'faculty club' and a 'community of teachers'. Palmer states, 'Good talk about good teaching is what we need--to enhance both our professional practice and the selfhood from which it comes'.

When Palmer holds faculty workshops, he asks faculty to talk about what best teachable moments they used to get their students to learn. Palmer calls these teachable moments, 'Critical moments'. "Critical moments is a simple approach I use in faculty workshops to invite people to share their practice in an open and honest way." (150) In other words, how do you get students to open up, learn and be excited about the topic? And what teachable moments caused your students to shut down?

The teacher wrote this in our announcements as a topic to focus on for this week:

This week's topic hits really close to home....it is about conversations between us.  Feeling open enough to bring forth your problems and being open enough to get the feedback.  It isn't easy.  We have all had managers and superiors who were were afraid to take chances with.  if we tried something new and we failed, how could we explain it?  Would they understand the purpose of trying something new?

We have to be willing to talk.  It is similar what we ask from our students.  One of my favorite take-aways from this chapter is that when we speak we want to be heard and seen....not fixed. 

Chapter 6: Learning in Community: The Conversation of Colleagues

 Part 1:

A feel good question for you for Part 1. Tell us about a mentor or teacher that evoked the teacher in you.  How did that person make such a connection with you?  Also, just as a follow-up, have you ever told him or her?

 Part 2:

On page 150 Parker discusses "Critical moments" in a class. This is one in which the learning opportunities will be high, or shut down.  Think about your teaching.....your class.  Where is a critical moment in your class and what do you do during this time? 

 Part 1: For me, the most influential teacher was the mentor that I had when student teaching for my teaching credential at CSUN. She taught me that the most important component to teaching is not so much what you are teaching, but to show students that you care about them.  My mentor's name was Merceda M.  I was assigned her French class to teach for my student teaching. Merceda always listened to her students' problems. She made sure she was always present and available for her students. As a result, students grew to love her and once the students loved her, they created an unbreakable bond that lasted throughout the students' lifetime.  I remember one parent teacher conference where the parents of a student proudly told Merceda that they had met in her classroom, and now the parents were thrilled that their child was also getting Merceda as their teacher. When Merceda taught Le Petit Prince, she would cry during the most tender moments of the novel. She would repeat her crying period after period, year after year.  She taught in the same classroom the same subject for 40 years before she retired.  At one point, all the French teachers in the area had had Merceda as either their teacher or their mentor.  Ever since I met Mercedia, I have striven to be just like her--to be a caring teacher always available to the students.  To be honest, I cannot remember if I have ever told her she was my most influential teacher/mentor.

Part 2:  Palmer talks about 'critical moments' in the class where you can motivate students to learn along a timeline. I find teachable moments when doing Zoom lectures, I stop every 10 minutes to engage in class discussion. I make up class discussion questions that I embed in my Zoom lectures so students can stop and reflect on how the topic applies to their lives and for me to gauge how much the students are understanding the topic. If they cannot answer the reflection questions, then I know to repeat that information some more in my lecture, and to repeat another version of that information in the next lecture.

Other ways I check for comprehension and mastery is to see what kinds of mistakes students are making overall as I grade their assignments. If for example, students are not placing their thesis statements as the last sentence of the first paragraph and if this is a common error among many students, then I know to create an entire power point lesson just on explaining why they need to place the thesis statement as the last sentence of the first paragraph.

The third way I scan for critical moments is that I note down all the grammar and punctuation errors my class makes as a whole. Then, I will create a lesson on the most common errors students make as a whole. Students typically make similar mistakes from class to class, so it is possible to reuse mistakes from a previous class so as not to reinvent the wheel.

To me, what would shut down students is to put too much red ink on a paper, or to cross out a students' story as 'incorrectly done'.  As Palmer says, you must always make room for the students' voice and when you cross out the students' story as incorrect due to bad essay structure or if you over correct too many grammar errors, students become discouraged and will refuse to write again in the same enthusiasm they did the first time, and they may also dislike writing thanks to overgrading. It is a careful balancing act to preserve student voice, yet still teaching students the 'correct' way to structure their essay.

I am most proud of my students when towards the end of the class just about everyone has mastered the core concepts of the class. I love looking at the Week 11 Rough drafts and be able to say to students, "You are now a pro in writing the five paragraph essay structure.'

 

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