Laura+Hopkins

Reflection:

I also totally forgot about this assignment over the week! As a student I remember being part of many discussions. I also have been a fairly quiet student. I would rather listen than particpate in discussions. But I can remember being actively engaged in discussions that I felt like actually related to my life. As a teacher, I think that it is super important to have discussions that make students think while allowing it to relate to their lives personally. It is also important to not play a questioning game and have students try and "guess what I'm thinking". I want it to be an authentic discussion and that they know there is not a correct answer. At the beginning of the year I think it is necessary for me to play a more active role in facilitaing disscussions so students kind of know what questions to be asking and what to think about while reading, but also making sure that literature is almost always up for questioning and interpreting meaning. As the year goes on, they will be able to do this more and more without so much from me. In my mentor teachers classroom, I think she does a nice job of getting students interested and focused. She starts with a personal thing about herself and then from there that kind of gets the students thinking and talking. I think by having class discussions and relating topics back to to students lives helps to make a much more positive experience in reading. I feel that personal relation to discussions makes students think critically about things happening in a book or things happening in their lives.

Unit Plan Calendar for LOTF!! This is a very rough draft! A lot of what I have is stuff from my teacher and it seems to work well together.

Reflecting on Engagement:

As everyone else has said, finding material that is interesting and engaging is definitely going to be a challenge. Being engaged in learning is critical in development and for the whole learning process. I know that if something is super boring or irrelevant, I don't want to learn or a I have a really hard time being able to comprehend. In deciding what to teach for Lord of the Flies, that has been one of the most challenging aspects. The book itself isn't really very interesting, but there are underlying themes that i think studetns can connect to but will they be that engaged that they will figure them out themselves, or will I have to walk them through the novel without them being engaged, relying on the projects to engage them in material that they "should" learn.

I have been sifting through all of my mentor teachers lesson plans and there just seems like there is so much material to teach in such a short amount of time and trying to find what will get them interested is harder than I thought it would be. There are so many students in a class and so many different learning styles that it makes it a difficult process to determine what to use and what to leave out. I want the activities to be something that students feel like matters to their own lives so they are engaged, while being able to see the big picture while reading the novel.

Unit Memo: I have not really gotten the chance to talk to my mentor teacher about what exactly what I will be teaching, but I think it is going to be Lord of the Flies during the novel unit for 10th grade. Learning Goals and Standards: Based on the Boise School District goals for the 4th quarter novel unit. Concepts- Narrative techniques, behavior expectations, civilization versus savagery. Writing- Response writing, learning log/journal and in class writing prompts.

Students will write a literary analysis as a culminating project or students will write a reflective piece connecting the novel to contemporary issues. For this unit I will use standard 0721.14 Acquire Skills for Literary Response. This standard wants students to be able to define and understand words like allegory, archetype, dramatic irony, ethics, leadership and different points of view to write a literary response.When doing class discussions I will mainly be focusing on students being able to understand plot, theme and point of view so they can be able to do the culminating assignment which is a literary analysis. The Boise curriculum has ideas planned out and already has the nouns like identify, create, compare, catergorize, illustrate,develop and explain pointed out which makes it nice when planning the unit.

Essential Questions: What is the typical day for the American teenager? What are taboo things in our culture? Other cultures? How do we shape our view of others? How do our surroundings impact our view of the world? ( I haven't read the book yet, so after I do that I will probably have my own, sexier questions)

Culminating Assignment The district requires a literary analysis, but another idea I had was to have students write from another point of view and defend why they did that. Or have students write a reflective essay on importance of the events in the book to their personal development.

After this past weeks discussions, I have done a lot of contemplating on my own learning experiences as well as how others learn and understand. There are so many different aspects of learning and understanding that I hadn't given too much thought to before this class. I have begun to think more about the learning that goes on outside of the classroom. As a teacher, I know that it will be really important for me to take what students already know and help to build upon that knowledge so that learning can happen.

Learning is a complicated process that all people go through. Everyone has a different rate of learning and although it's not always easy, teachers have to be able to accommodate these different learning processes. You can see when learning is taking place when people can take new experiences and build on them or make connections to other aspects of their knowledge. This happens all throughout life, and not just in the classroom. From listening to the presentations I truly realized how different all of our backgrounds are and how in order to have gotten thus far,we have all definitely all gone through our fair share of trials in which I'm sure we gained a lot of knowledge to use for my future. I really liked the quote Allison had on her page about learning because it is so true and I think a lot of learning happens when you actually don't expect to be learning too.

I liked what was said from class discussions and presentations because it really made me think about how to have learning take place and by taking students out of the comfort zone and pushing a little further each time in order for learning and advancement to happen. All of us mentioned how we had really great teachers or professors at some point in our learning and how we have all had a really bad experience with a teacher. The teacher that really made the difference was the one we didn't love during our time in the class but after, we realized how far we had come, or how much we have learned. I think that is an important thing to think about because we probably don't want students to hate us, but we also can't just be their best friend. I don't want to be that teacher who ruins a students ideas or excitement about a class or subject. Having and open attitude and willingness to be there for students in their learning process is the kind of teacher I will strive to be because I know, personally, how devastating a teacher can be on a student. That will be challenge in the beginning to find that balance.