Mini-lesson Reflections 1 & 2

Dear Fellow VAKS,

When teaching these small, yet seemingly insignificant lessons there are many things I learned, actually. Which I was quite surprised. When I first thought about who I wanted to teach, I immediately thought of the rowdy kid who never wants to sit down to do his homework and the ELL who is being pulled out of the classroom at least 3 times a day. But when I thought about it more, I wanted to spend some time with the students who perhaps weren't so obviously struggling. I wanted some kids in the classroom that there wasn't a clear diagnoses on. So I thought about students who I did not know or hear much about. A couple students came to mind.

One was a quiet Latina girl who was very sweet and hardly made eye contact. Every time I have tried to get to explain what she was doing on her school work, or even say hi, she gave me less than a sentence.

The other was the "new kid" who apparently had been labeled under special education in his previous school, but had not recieved any paperwork in his new school yet. I distinctly remember the second encounter I had with him, after my introduction shaking his hand. I was told that he often gets off track, and that they were supposed to be studying independently for a spelling test they were about to have in a few minutes. So I took "initiative" and interrupted his conversation with another student.I told him I wanted to quiz him on some of the spelling words, and so ignorantly assuming he would struggle with this. He spelled every word perfectly.

So when I took them out of the classroom, we worked on a really fun activity on Kerpoof.com and they were able to write their own stories from the visuals that were given. The website would not load on the school computers for about 20 minutes, and I thought this was a huge inconvenience at the time...but it was in this time that we were able to talk with no agenda. I was able to find out the girl's favorite band and TV show-which was a passion that I had never seen from her before. I was able to joke and laugh about the book Where the Wild Things Are in a really in-depth way from the "new kid" because the book was left on the table.

Then once we got started they excelled in ways that were unexpected by both me and my mentor teacher.

In this whole brief reflection, I can narrow what I learned from this to three things.

1) Do not just assume because someone is quiet that they do not have mountain loads to share
2) Do not just assume that the labels handed over to you define their learning capabilities
3) Take advantage of the non-instructional settings and befriend your students

All best in your future challenges and rewards,

Sarah Rawley