The past two weeks have been a rollercoaster ride.  Prior to the practicum, sitting inside those classrooms in Scarfe, I always thought to myself, “yeah, I’ve got what it takes.  Just put me in front of those kids and I’ll show them some learnin’!”  This week taught me that I, like the students who will be under my care, have lots of learnin’ to do myself.

My class gave me the wonderful opportunity to learn why it is important for lessons to be designed specifically for a given class and should not be generalized.  There is a gap between theory (lesson plan) and practice (teaching to the class) that, without careful preparation, can go sideways at any moment.  The responsibility is on the teacher, as classroom facilitator, to make these contingency plans.  Because things will go sideways, and according to Murphy’s law, they will always do so at the most inconvenient moment.

One of the first steps to contingency planning, I’ve realized, is having the proper mindset.  By that, I don’t exactly mean being in a “problem-solving mindset”.  I believe that contingency-planning must begin from a firm desire to place the goals and needs of the class before our own individual intentions.  A facilitator who feels compelled to push the pace forward to catch up with his intended schedule will inevitably lose touch with his class and may very well notice his students starting to disengage, zone out, or perhaps even some rebellious behaviours, all resulting in decreases in academic performance.  A facilitator who insists on teaching a concept through a certain activity, despite knowing his class lacks the skills with which to succeed, may end up introducing feelings of inadequacies in his students

This is, of course, barely scratching the surface of the ideas swimming about in my head — it will take some time to tie them down and anchor them to words.  Hopefully that can occur within the following days.

* * *

In retelling the story of my last lesson, I liked to place extra emphasis on The Wasp for triggering the cascade of events that led to me losing control of the class.  Mostly because it would be easy for my audience to sympathize with random occurrence leading to catastrophic failure; in fact, I intentionally used this to redirect the conversation away from what I was focusing most on during the past two weeks.  The decisions I made, whether in reaction to escalating energy to where I wanted the lesson to end up, all had something in common.

• When A expressed fear after noticing the wasp, I allowed him to get up off his chair, and did not object to his moving about the room in an attempt to escape The Wasp’s insecty wrath.  Assumption:  helping A take action to remedy his feelings of anxiety would allow him to de-escalate and refocus
• After witnessing A’s extreme reaction, several other students began to feel anxious as well, starting to get out of their seats.  At first, I tried to model calmness by completely ignoring The Wasp as it buzzed irritatingly close to my body, performing fly-bys of my ear on a few occasions.  What that didn’t work, I suggested/instructed the anxious students to stand by our EA.  Assumptions:  modeling “calm behaviour” will help students realize The Wasp wasn’t really that scary; that congregating as a group may be successful in dispelling anxiety and fear (this I find, in retrospect, extremely humourous)

In case it isn’t already apparent, the big similarity between all those assumptions I made was that I idealized my students.  One of the secrets to my passion to teaching and my bottomless care-pot is the fact that I believe in the best of all my students, and I try my best to remain optimistic and generous, always giving the benefit of the doubt.  My SA has shared, on several occasions, that certain students (while very pleasant to chat with) were taking advantage of my “niceness” — namely, I neither reacted to nor reprimanded disrespectful behaviour, and by my actions communicated that I condoned that kind of behaviour.  I thought I was cutting back that aspect, but every once in a while I would notice that I am (again) letting things slide, albeit not quite as smoothly as before (I would still believe the students to be angels, but reprimanded their behaviour by just calling attention to it and saying, “I know what you’re doing”).  And when The Wasp invaded the modular, I learned of another dangerous aspect of such an assumption — idealizing my students causes me to lose touch with them, which in turn leads me to react in a completely random way.  And I say completely random, because since I can no longer claim that I’m acting in the children’s best interest, and I definitely wasn’t asking in my own best interest.  Safe to say, it was benefiting somebody… at least then someone could benefit from that whole experience.

The decision to continue with my original plan of learning through collaborating as groups and sharing role-plays with the rest of the class was equally delusional in the sense that I convinced myself that not only would the students be able to overcome their earlier heightened emotions and focus, that they would be productive and on-task through the entire activity.  To add a cherry on top of the chaos pie, I had neglected to really lay out the ground rules (I don’t think I laid too many of those out) and consequences for off-task behaviour; so I ended up interpreting horsing around with “having fun with the activity”, and students falling over each other and laughing as “part of putting together their role-play”.

… yeah.  I don’t really think it was The Wasp, although he was quite the worthy adversary.

Lessons learned:

• Be pleasant to each student, and love each for who they are… beyond that, focus primarily on what they are saying/doing at the moment
  • My care and affection for each student can and should manifest itself in my conscious choice to address the behaviour, not the student him or herself, no matter how much the behaviour bothers me
• Being firm is an important way of caring for my students.  Being firm allows them to form consistent expectations, which in turn prepares them for future success; by being inconsistent or too permissive, I run the risk of communicating to them that there are no boundaries, or that they’re so far apart they may as well be no boundaries.  What then are they to build on?
• Assume the best, plan for the worst
  • Remain grounded, in the moment, flexible, observant, and reactive to allow for smoother transitions.  After all, teachers play the most pleasant role of behaviour monitor to 30-odd students
• Start low, go high — everybody benefits from clear, concise, easy-to-understand instructions with clear, logical, natural consequences.  If it truly is review for everyone, then everyone will let me know… hopefully that’s what’s actually shown!