Amber Hobson
Chapter 7
A guiding hand- Keeping a Project Moving
Keeping a project moving requires teachers to support students on their learning journey. Teaching a lesson, may never turn out the way you expect. Even if you have done it many of times before. Things will always be different with a different group of students. But, this is what teaching is all about. As a teacher you need to be able to adapt to what ever happens, even if you were not expecting things to go that way. You need to be quick and make things work. You always want to keep your students moving to the goal, even if you end up going a different route.
Discussion is something that is very important in a classroom. Wether it is between teacher to teacher, student to student, or teacher to student. When working on any type of project it is always good to take opportunities to work together, and have set goals, and have a game plan, so working together between teacher to teacher discussion is always good to make sure you are on the same page, or to solve problems. Two brains are always better than one! I think that student to student discussion is something that is very important, especially while doing any sort of project. Students should be communicating with each other, they can really help to resolve a problem, or to help each other out. If someone is not understanding it is very important that they can talk to one of their fellow classmates so they can really understand. This helps them also to get things done by communicating with one another when they do something with in the project. It helps them build communication skills. They can give feedback to one another, you could model how yo give effective feedback so they can give students opportunities to practice these important communication skills with their classmates. Then one of the most important discussions is between teacher to student. This is where you can communicate with the class as a whole to ask questions, both from the teacher to the student and from the student to the teacher. This is where the teacher can teach new lessons and demonstrate things to the class.
There are many questions that there will be for checking in to see how everything is going. Some of these questions could be Procedural- to track progress toward milestones and deadlines. Teamwork- How well the team is working, if everyone is pulling their weight. Understanding- Are they really understanding what they are doing, encourage students to push themselves. And Self-assessment- You can find out what your students really thing about the project, have them reflect on the project ask them to demonstrate what they have learned.
Until I started taking my education classes, I never stopped to think about how teachers really have to be on their toes during lessons and be prepared for anything and everything. I never thought that they would ever have to take into consideration if students decide to take the conversation elsewhere, which makes me give teachers even more props than I did before. I liked when you said, "things will always be different with a different group of students". Every student brings something different to the classroom, as well as every classroom is going to bond/mesh together differently and it is the teacher's job to work with the "mesh" and "bonds" of their students in their classroom(s). This is also something that teachers need to be on their toes for, for when their class of students aren't like the ones they've had in previous years. The quote that comes to mind when thinking about this issue is: GO WITH THE FLOW!
ReplyDeleteGo with the flow, yo
Your students will benefit
It will all work out