Today, though, today I found my "I get this!" moment. I may have found it sooner if I hadn't been putting it under so much pressure. Today in my Content Area Reading (READ) class our teacher modeled a lesson to explain what she had wanted us to take away from last week's class. A lot of my classmates had left confused. We've been talking about Disciplinary Literacy, which may be something that non-education folks don't know about so let me give you a quick definition as far as I know it: Disciplinary Literacy is basically using literature in all content areas, not just English. It's teaching a student how to read. The example I came up with was that a Math teacher is not teaching a student how to read but is teaching the student how to read Math. See the difference? I could but others not so much.
Back to today: our teacher modeled a lesson about Christopher Columbus. The lesson made sense to me and I enjoyed being a student student again, meaning not a student who will be a teacher but a student who is just a student. It makes sense if you're an education major. Anyway, the lesson was great but my "I get this!" moment happened at the end of the lesson when our teacher explained how she formulated the lesson. She handed out a sheet of paper with a diagram on it(I'll post a picture of it when I can get home and scan it). This simple diagram told me everything I had been doing wrong when student teaching. This was it! It was not that I hadn't been planning; it was that I had not been planning correctly! It was amazing. I began thinking about the few lessons I taught where the students were truly in a flow and looking at this diagram I realized why.
The basic idea if you follow the flow of the diagram is this: Prior Knowledge generates Purpose which directs Attention and Selects the New Information. The Students then Construct Meaning and create Understanding which then modifies their Prior Knowledge. In sentence form I don't think it has the same effect but you get the general idea.
I realized that my professor at the end of my student teaching had never really taught us how to plan. We were given a format - which can be very helpful - and told to create a lesson plan for a Gateway Activity. A Gateway Activity is basically something to get the students into a flow of learning, to get them into the lesson before you get to the meat of if. Most of us did well on this first lesson plan but as the semester went on and we pressed for more help with planning from - I'll call her - Dr. B we did not get much more than the format. My cooperating teacher, as you learned from my last post, was not too much help in this department after her medical emergency. I felt very much on my own and when I feel this way I have a habit of not getting help, not because I am too proud but because I am always afraid whoever I ask will tell me how I should know this already. I have a fear of appearing stupid to people in authority, to looking like I don't deserve to be where I am. Dr. B was one of those people that you were afraid to ask because you would get either a slightly helpful answer or get grilled on why you don't know how to do something and how she's questioning why she gave you such good grades in the past. This has happened before and it will happen again.
But my READ class today changed all that. I got it! At the moment I am no longer questioning whether or not I should be a teacher as I had been since last April. I couldn't believe how one piece of paper could change my whole life. I can do this! I feel like I have gone through a learning cycle of my own.
