It is just as important to get to know your students as learners as it is to learn about your students as people. This means getting to know who they are and what influences them. Getting to know your students helps create a special bond with your students, so you're not talking at them while at the front of the class, but engaging the students as well. We discussed in class easy and simple ways to create this bond to get to know your students. Simply knowing that you aren't the only person in the room when teaching, and making sure to include the students in your lesson. The students will in turn trust you as their educator and respect you. Knowing how the students are as people will help you to design your lessons as well. In the readings from last week, Gloria Ladson Billings talks about teachers use culturally relevant practices. The practices she discusses can help form bonds and help you get to know the diversity in the classroom. Some examples include seeing teaching as an art and seeing themselves as a part of the community. If you see your teaching as an art and come up with activities and lessons that are meaningful and exciting for your students, they will respond and you may even see the students as artists too. Seeing yourself as a part of the community is another way in which to get to know your students from a multiple perspective. Simply attending a school dance or sporting event will show you a whole other side of your student, you can see your student as an individual, or athlete, etc. You may see into their family life, why they aren't getting homework done, or why they don't understand a specific concept. Another easy way to understand the diversity in your classroom is to do writing or artwork in class. You can tell a lot about the student by what they write, or what they draw or paint. Taking time to talk to the students about whatever during recess or lunch time can be effective to understand students from a different perspective as well.
The next few weeks, at recess, I will make it a point to talk to a new student each day and ask them questions about themselves. I will ask the students what they like about school, their favorite subject, etc. Then, I will do into more of the student's personal life by asking them about their siblings, who they live with, what they like to do after school. I will give the students an opportunity to just talk. It won't have to be school related, they can talk to me about anything. By doing this, it will not only establish trust and a rapport with my students, but I will get to know about the components that come together to make the classroom of fifth graders, (kind of like the salad bowl/diversity analogy for the world).
I like your ideas about bringing your classroom's diversity into your curriculum, I think that it is a great way to get your students really involved in their learning and help them to take a personal ownership of their own learning. As a teacher how would you get to know your students from the very beginning of the school year? I agree with you that writing assignments such as journals and drawings can tell a lot, but what about before your students even step into the classroom. One really interesting and useful techniques that my MT did was that she sent home a form to every students' home for their parents to fill out. The form asked very personal questions such as who the child lives with, what their occupations were, what the relationships were like among siblings, what the student is involved in, what they like to do, etc. The parents or guardians were to send the forms back to the teacher before school that way when the students filed in to her classroom they were not just names for her to get to know and she wasn't building relationships with the kids blindly. My MT already knew a great deal of information about the students and had a base to build off of. I think that this can help create an environment where the kids are more interested in having a relationship with you and you'll already be able to show that you're invested in their lives which a lot of times helps you to learn the diversity of your classroom much faster. How would you handle going to sporting events, would you go to all of your kids events, or just pick the ones that had the most of your students involved. I think that it is a great way to be invested in your kids lives, and I too would love to do that, but then I began thinking about how I would pick and choose or even if that is fair because with having a balance between professional and personal life it could get sticky trying to go to all of your kids' events. How as a teacher would you handle that?
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