Synthesis Statement

Analysis of Teaching of World Languages

             The middle field teaching experience has come to an end and there are so many things that this experience has taught me about myself and also about my teaching.  Some of my strengths have been developed, while others have surfaced during this experience.  In addition, limitations that concerned me before the experience have now developed into strengths.  Yet there were other limitations that I have become aware of, that I had anticipated.  These strengths and limitations that have come from this experience have helped to modify my view on teaching and to construct new goals that I can work on during my upcoming student teaching experience in the World Languages classroom.

Based on my previous experiences in working with children, one of my concerns as I headed into a teaching environment was classroom management.  I genuinely enjoy being around children, however I sometimes had a difficult time being “mean” to them or demanding control.  I find that the middle field experience provided me with the ideal context to improve on this.  These students were used to little to no control in the classroom, they were allowed to talk during lessons, and it was not uncommon to hear negative comments during lessons as well.  I found that this environment was extremely distracting to my teaching and I made a very conscious effort to change this while I was teaching.  Through the use of verbal and non-verbal gestures, I was very pleased with my progress in this area of teaching.  This growth can be seen through my journals/reflections:

“After being frustrated with the class’s behavior last week during my lesson, I decided that today my goal and main focus for this lesson would be classroom management…I was very pleased with how well the students responded when I asked them nicely to be quiet…My favorite part is when I stopped talking when it got a little loud, and certain students in the class told them to “shut up”.  I was very glad to see that the students were capable of monitoring themselves.”  -Journal, November 8^th) 

I was very proud when my mentor teacher commented that I did well with classroom management as part of her evaluation of an observation of a lesson in which I placed this as one of my top priorities for the day.  As time went on, I found myself feeling more comfortable with the students, and I also realized that in allowing myself to let my guard down, as well as through letting the personalities of the students come through, I found I was able to let the students see more of my personality and I could “play off” of their personalities, and this seemed to really change the dynamics of the classroom.  The students seemed much more engaged, focused, and motivated.  This is something that I will definitely remember for my student teaching experience!

Other limitations that I faced during my experience was how to keep every student engaged in the lesson.  Certainly there were some students who were very motivated and focused on the material, yet in each of my classes there were a select few who were very difficult to motivate or engage in the material.  I found this, along with being able to reach every student every day, to be very difficult situations to address.  How can I increase a student’s motivation to learn French?  In this particular community, the students were in a very rural setting and it is difficult for them to find a real true “need” to know French.  These are things that I hope to improve upon in the future.  One of the ideas I would like to try in the future is not so much focusing on how to order a croissant at a café, but showing students how learning another language can open their minds in other more personal ways that can be relevant to their daily lives. 

I also found my high expectations for the students were somewhat of a limitation in the environment I was placed in, mainly because it seemed that neither the teacher nor the students had very high expectations in place.  I had to remind myself that I should not reduce my expectations and I was very surprised with how much the students were capable of when the bar was raised.  This is a statement taken from my last reflections:

“These students do what they have to do to get by and they know that not much effort or accuracy is expected of them.  I’ve noticed that most of the times that I have pushed the bar a little for them, they have risen to the occasion and they are capable of working under more serious and demanding situations.  That is not to say that I don’t want the students to enjoy the class – but I really think that they are capable of much more than what the teacher is currently expecting from them.”

Through my teaching, I’ve also learned the importance of prerequisite skills and that French relies so heavily on the foundations that were previously built.  Activities that are very well structured seemed to work much better than open-ended activities in the classes that I worked with and so I’ve also improved a great deal on adding structure to the activities I planned.  Finally, two other things that I feel I have improved upon during this experience have been showing interest in the students and also my skills for evaluating assessments and the effectiveness of my lessons.  Especially through Inquiry 3, I’ve learned that there are so many ways to assess how students are doing before, during, and after a lesson, yet all of these serve a vital role in determining how effective my lessons have been but also in planning future lessons.

Something else that surprised me during my experience in regards to classroom management is how the students react to my approaches.  By this I mean that I had thought that if I walk into the classroom being very serious and with high expectations, then the students would work well and behave.  However, it almost seemed that the more I let my guard down, worked with the students and allowed the students’ personalities to influence the dynamics of my planning and teaching, the more the students were receptive, willing to work with me, and fun.  I also noticed that students that typically did not participate in the past were starting to volunteer more often and play more of a role in the classroom dynamics.  I noticed this works differently for different classes.  The following is a quote also taken from my last reflections:

“I learned that students seem to become much more interested in the material when I “come down to their level”, particularly the 8^th period class.  With the 5^th period class, I noticed I was a little bit more of a “teacher figure” and that worked really well.  I think that the 8^th period class really loves to aggravate teachers and get to them, and so by working with them and allowing them that little bit of freedom to have fun and joke around worked well and actually surprisingly encouraged them to focus more and become more engaged in the material! ”

However, there are some issues that I have yet to resolve.  I remain conflicted on what the focus of the classroom should be.  As previously mentioned in my teaching philosophy and Inquiry 2, I thought that misbehavior would be impossible if there was an academic focus.  Yet I have found that having an academic focus is nearly impossible if students are misbehaving.  I have mentioned some of these frustrations in journal entries, and it’s possible that this challenge may have been partially due to the situation that I walked into, yet I think there is something more here.  It appears that perhaps classroom behavior cannot be ignored and bad behavior will not just “go away” if academic expectations are set high.  The two must work together, however, perhaps it is necessary to establish a level of acceptable behavior and then enforce academic expectations after that.  As I said, I am still very conflicted on this particularly issue of teaching, and I look forward to experimenting more with a new group of students!

Other goals that I have for my student teaching experience include establishing an efficient and productive daily routine, and incorporating more of the target language and culture into the classroom.  I would also like to improve on having more students engaged and increasing the level of motivation for the students to learn French.  It is also my hope that they feel that they are truly learning something of personal importance and relevance.  In other words, I hope that students find ways to apply what they learn somehow into their “real world” and they are able to see some kind of connection from the classroom to their daily lives.  These are all things that I am looking forward to working on next semester and I am confident that I will continue to grow both personally and professionally.

(written December 3, 2004 for Inquiry 5)