My experience student teaching at Kenilworth Junior High was an opportunity to challenge so many of the assumptions I’d developed during the previous semesters of my teaching credential program. In doing so, I found out both how right and wrong they were. Here are a few things that I learned during my semester.

Classroom Management

In one of my classes, we discussed the “multidimensionality” of a secondary classroom: the idea that many different–and, at times, opposing–activities are happening at the same time in the the same place. I literally rolled my eyes at this idea. After all, isn’t every workplace multidimensional?

Once I began teaching, however, I realized just how different things are in a classroom. For example, workers are motivated by a paycheck. Students are motivated by…? Truancy laws? Parents? Some show intrinsic motivation in school, but many do not. Junior high is particularly tricky in this regard. As students fully enter adolescence, they begin to question the purpose of school. At the same time, their grades aren’t as important as they will be in high school. On the one hand, this creates a time when they can make mistakes and explore who they are with minimal negative repercussions. But on the other hand, without extrinsic motivation, the system almost asks students to develop intrinsic motivation at a time when their brains have not yet developed the ability to do that. How do teachers help bridge that gap? To me, this is the big, underlying challenge with classroom management.

I can’t say I solved this question, but I did have some successes that I can build on.

• Keep students engaged by challenging them and trusting them with difficult content

Before launching into a unit on Bruce Brooks’ novel Moves Make the Man, which is set in North Carolina during the early 1960s just as an all-white school is being integrated, my mentor teacher and I felt we needed to prepare the students for the main character’s use of the “n-word.” We had them read Gloria Naylor’s essay “Mommy, What Does N***** Mean?” and discuss it in small groups, focusing on the effect of the word on other people. As part of the discussion, we set the expectation that we would not be using the word in class. The article and honest discussion helped students realize that it doesn’t matter what meaning or intention the speaker uses with that word. What matters is the effect on another person. Students remained extremely respectful of the rule and sensitive to the issues it raised throughout the unit.

• Body language is half the battle

At some point during my first few weeks of teaching, I realized that I never left the podium. Fearing that I would lose my place in my lesson, I stood glued to the floor. I began moving from side to side, but during one visit, my supervisor told me that there were two parts of the room that I was avoiding. I realized that I still didn’t feel that I “owned” the room. I thought often of Amy Cuddy’s TED talk on powerful body language, which we watched in our classroom management class. Not only did I begin walking through and around the entire classroom during class, but I also reexamined other elements of my body language.

For example, I made more use of the heavy wait. In my two observation semesters, I noted the power of the heavy wait. I saw that the facial expression of a teacher could make or break the effectiveness of this tool: a cheery smile undermines it, a serious expression complements it.

Planning

I am a planner. My mentor teacher, who has been teaching at Kenilworth for nearly 15 years, tends to shoot from the hip. Working with both his style and my style was extremely challenging for me because it forced me to work against my nature. So much of teaching is improvisation, and although I believe that the better I plan, the better I can improvise, there were some days that we went in and settled on a lesson plan ten minutes before class. On those days, I may not have felt as confident, but the lessons were still successful: students were engaged and learning. And that’s what matters.

That said, I feel that I am much closer to understanding where I should fall on the spectrum between over planning and improv. By the end of the semester, I realized that there were certain skills I couldn’t introduce or build on (e.g., a more structured revision process) because the foundation wasn’t there. I am starting to see how those skills can be introduced in the beginning of the school year and gradually developed throughout the year. At the same time, I have a toolbox full of quick lesson structures that I can fall back on if a lesson I’ve planned doesn’t work.

Instructing

Going into student teaching, I knew that one of my strengths would be content planning, but my challenge was finding effective ways to teach that content to my students. Although I never believed in the transactional model of teaching, finding ways to help students make meaning and develop academic literacy in English was a bigger challenge than I realized.

Here, too, I learned a few tricks I can fall back on.

• Quickwrite > partner > notecard share. My mentor teacher makes effective use of this variation on think/pair/share. The key elements are to think of one provocative question, give a very short period of time (say, 30 seconds to 1 minute) for students to jot down ideas. This feeds their partner discussions, which should be monitored by the teacher, who is circulating and helping jumpstart stalled conversations. After, the notecard share (in which students’ names are called at random from notecards) encourages all students to be accountable for an answer.

• Slow down. Even more. No, still more. Recently, my mentor teacher led students through a process that I had taught another class earlier in the semester. I tried to teach it in about a third of a period. His lesson took the entire period (actually longer, since the first part of it was homework). It’s difficult to accurately estimate how long it will take students to work through a new skill, especially one with a heavy cognitive load, but it always takes longer than I think it will.

Assessing

The great value of PACT for me was to show me how to reassess my assessments. Before PACT, my rubrics focused on how well students met the criteria of the assignment. After PACT, my rubrics and grading reflected what students learned and should have learned. If the class overall didn’t learn a concept or skill I taught them, I can’t penalize them for it. I need to reteach it in a way that they will learn it.

Here are two other lessons I learned about assessing work.

• Manage the process, not the product.

All of my written assignments include several steps that are reviewed along the way. Students are most successful when we give significant class time for them to work on assignments, have multiple “products” (e.g., proposal, research notes, outlines, first draft, revision worksheets) that can be checked along the way. If at any point a student is veering off track, we can help steer them back. Ultimately, the final grade for the piece should be something they expect, based on the feedback we’ve given them along the way.

• Policies should support the most important skills students need to develop.

The eighth grade regular English class I taught during my student teaching semester has continually forced me to reexamine my priorities in teaching. Many of them lack intrinsic motivation, yet they are skeptical of teachers’ techniques. So many of them struggle with turning in assignments, that my philosophy on late work took a complete 180-degree turn. At the beginning of the semester, I thought the solution was to be very strict in enforcing deadlines and late penalties. By the end of the semester, I realized that I needed to be more flexible with late work. To me, there was more value in giving struggling students the feeling of success and having them practice the skills rather than have them learn that if they missed a deadline they might as well not bother.