In this semester long project, I visited and observed a fifth grade mythology class at Hartford Magnet Trinity College Academy. With the guidance of the mythology teacher, Mr. LeVasseur, and my course Professor, Dr. Kelly Dugan, I’ve designed three culturally relavent and creation-based activity plans for fifth grade students and within the context of mythology . Below is my teaching statement, outlining my goals and approach, my reflection on visiting Mr. Levasseur’s class, and my reflection of my lesson creation. In the menu, you can find the outline of three activities (one of which I co-created with my peers).
Teaching Statement:
My approach to teaching is creating lessons that have a variety of pathways to achieve the objective. For example, I have taught a three-lesson workshop for 5th grade students that centered in mathematics, culture, creativity, and collaboration. Students were able to explore topics differently by creating their own math problems, solving them in a variety of ways, and even in different languages. Through doing this, students learned in their own ways and from each other instead by collectively working in one way. Additionally, students were able to connect their home and culture into the classroom by speaking/writing in different languages and by designing worksheets/lessons in languages and about different cultures.This student-centered approach ensures that there is flexibility and inclusion of unique needs of the many minds in the classrooms. In all, my goal is to have lessons that are relevant and sustainable for students in the way that they can use the skills outside of the classroom.
Reflection:
During my visit on Oct 5, the lesson started with a 5 minute minute TEDed video about the myth of Prometheus giving humans fire and civilization and a class discussion (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_u91SjrEOE). This first part was a bit disorderly because most of the time was spent getting students to sit down in silence to watch the video and during the discussion, trying to get students to listen up and follow directions; many students were not receptive to Mr. LeVasseur questions/directions. Then, they did a vocab activity where each student got an index card with a word and each would read a myth and find where the word is used to create their own inferred definition and they were allowed to talk with each other and move around the room. It took a little bit to get students back on task and I worked with some for a few minutes to get them going. At one point, when students were able to talk and observe what other students were doing, they started to understand that just searching for the words wouldn’t work– they needed to actually read the story to understand the context for their definitions. This showed me that lessons that involved allowing students to freely talk to others around them and working simultaneously can better engage students and foster increased learning compared to having students sit and be mostly silent. When the students started an activity where they got to look through a book and talk with each other, they got this activity done more efficiently than during a video-watching and whole class discussion activity. Thus, there is mobility of knowledge when students have the chance to talk to each other so by sharing each other’s knowledge to each other, learning occurs and work is being done.
Process reflection:
When I was working on my group activity with Sonia and Lola, collaboratively thinking about a story was successful because we all had something to bring to the table. First, we all thought about our own cultures and found a story that we could start off from. Then we decided we could use those for our individual/non-group activities and ended up using the myth of Arachne. Moreover, we all enjoy hands-on/product activities so together we were able to find a related arts and crafts activity which we made some changes and made it fit. Something that was challenging was making an activity that could be done within 20-30 minutes, was hands-on, and still engaging to 7th graders. For example, for my “The First Music” African myth activity, I chose to involve hands-on music making. Originally, each person in the whole class would make their own sound just like the animals in the forest to create music. But with all the students in the class, this could become chaotic and not have that much substance to it, especially because I would want them to be able to record it and have a product to keep. So I decided to split the classroom into groups so that they can easily record their own music and use a website/music software to also obtain a new skill. With that, another challenge and something that I could improve is making my activities more precise because although variety is good to have, the lesson/instruction can become confusing if there is less focus on a specific objective.