Prompt #3: Goldenburg

There are many distinct differences with the students in my classroom that affect their learning process. The teacher uses many different techniques in her lessons to help the students who have those linguistic, ethnic, and sociocultural characteristics understand what they are learning a lot easier. She is very responsive during assessments in the classroom, especially with linguistic and sociocultural characteristics.

The only tests that I have observed the students take are weekly spelling tests. The way that the teacher sets this up is that she gives each student a piece of loose leaf and has them number it one to twelve. Then she goes through each spelling word out loud, one by one. She says the word once, uses it in a sentence, then repeats the word one more time. I noticed after a while that she walked around the room as she went through this process with each of the twelve words. On some of the harder words, like conjunctions, she would say the word slower; making sure the students could hear the two parts of that particular word. Two or three students in the class always have a lot of difficulty with the spelling tests, and spelling in general. So as the teacher is going through the words, she sometimes stops at those kids’ desks and will quietly point out mistakes or give them a hint as to how to start off the word. Some of these students are bilingual, that is, they also speak Spanish when they are at home. I know this because I have observed a couple students speaking Spanish to each other. At one point, when one of the girls in my class was coming back from lunch, she answered her cell phone because her dad was calling and had to drop something off at the school. She had a conversation with him in Spanish; there was no English said at all. So English does not come first hand to them. So it takes a little bit longer for these students to grasp things like spelling and speaking in English.

The teacher notices that there are different sociocultural characteristics for each student and they all respond differently to assessments in the classroom. She responds to these characteristics in different ways, depending on the type of assessment; like for the spelling tests that I described above, she responds to the different linguistic characteristics in her classroom. This goes along with ethnic and sociocultural characteristics as well. The teacher is very good with recognizing these characteristics and coordinating her lessons and assessments around the differences in the classroom.

I connected this to Goldenburg because although none of the students are specified as English Language Learners, there are still some boundaries between these students and where they “should be”, according to certain standards. If a teacher ignores these boundaries and the different characteristics in his or her students, they are just holding them back from their full potential. Goldenburg says that teachers need to teach the students at a young age and give them support in order to break those boundaries and be looked at on the same level as students without this linguistic difference. The teacher in my classroom is giving her students the support they need by doing things such as giving a little extra help during assessments to those students who need it. The students need more attention by their teacher, in areas like language and spelling, instead of just getting ignored because of the label put on them and the culture they were brought up in.

Prompt #2 : Shor

http://www.infoworks.ride.uri.edu/2009/pdf/usinginfo/28158E-info.pdf

My classroom is pretty diverse. The students are mostly Hispanic and African American, but there are two or three White and Asian students as well. There are about sixteen students in the classroom, with twelve of them being boys. According to info works, ninety percent of the school is eligible for free or reduced price lunch. Knowing this data and going off looks, I am guessing that most of the children’s families are in the lower class range. None of the students in the school are receiving English as a second language, but twenty five percent are bilingual. This is interesting to me because I have heard two of the students in my classroom speaking Spanish to each other. The entire school is just as diverse as my classroom. Info works says that the school is 59% Hispanic, 31% African American, 6% White, 3% Asian, and 1% Native American. This is very different than the school system I grew up in, this school being much more diverse with all different races.

On info works, it says that eighty four percent of the students in the school do not receive special education services. The other sixteen percent is self contained special education and special education students with support. In the classroom that I am in now, there are no special education students. But I was in a different classroom the first week where there were two special education students and there was one aid in the room to help.

With all these differences throughout the classroom, I can tell that sometimes the teacher has a difficult time getting through to all the students. They are all at different levels of reading, writing, math, etc and you can see this when observing the classroom. The teacher really has to use different methods and take the extra time to make sure each student is able understand the lesson. Each child comes from a different background and different family life, so you never know, as a teacher, how the students are going to respond. The first or second time that I was in the classroom that I am currently tutoring in, the teacher was just beginning a new science unit on weather. She gathered everyone at the rug and went through all the different tools they would be using for the next month or so in this unit. There were about fifteen or twenty tools she wanted to show them; things like thermometers and how to measure rain water. Going over these things would seem like a quick and easy task, but it actually took her about 45 minutes to an hour to finish. This was because for each tool, every child had something to say about it and each had a different way of looking at it. I found this to be very interesting because it shows that each child has something different to bring to the classroom environment.

This goes along with what theorist Ira Shor said about participatory classrooms. Participation in a classroom is very important because it uses interaction between students and the teacher, and the flow of ideas. Shor says that this is the type of classroom that we need, unlike a passive curriculum, which instead will prepare a student to follow, not lead. My classroom is quite interactive. Discussions like the one I mentioned above have happened almost every time I have been there so far, and I can tell the teacher truly tries to have them as often as possible. It is important to get that participation in the classroom, as it connects with a democratic point of view, having both students and teachers working together on certain tasks. Shor argues that participation can work against the endullment of students’ minds. The teacher in my classroom is doing just that; working against endullment and helping the students to have a voice in their classroom.