My mentor teacher was out today, so by prior arrangement I visited three different classrooms: A Social Studies class in Government and two English classes. Once again I was impressed by the much more respectful behavior of the students compared with my old placement. Is it just the administration that makes such a difference?
The most instructive was the last class I visited, which was probably for juniors since the teacher is beginning to prepare them for their state standardized graduation test. It was the most word-rich environment I've yet encountered in any of the classrooms, with the walls full of posters, definitions, student work and so on, and the 50-minute period was divided up into various activities: A journal entry, sharing, going over the homework assignment, and then reading aloud from the play THE MIRACLE WORKER and discussion.
When the students shared their journals, the teacher was very specific in her praise ("That was very detailed; I hadn't known anything about that comic book hero and now I feel as if I'm familiar with him") and completely left out criticism, I think deliberately. Unlike my old mentor, she did not give points for sharing and told them exactly how much time they would have to answer her journal question ("If you could be any super hero, who would it be and why?").
And in THE MIRACLE WORKER, she took a behavior modification tack in her interpretation that was extremely effective. The kids really picked up on it. Describing the "fight scene" over dinner when Annie Sullivan first tries to get Helen Keller to eat with a spoon, one girl said: "I think Helen knew exactly what she was doing - she was just testing things out to control Annie. But her plan went wrong."
Now, I wonder how many of the students applied that lesson to themselves . . . ?
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