Remembering to Reflect: My mid-year check-in!

At the beginning of each school year, I create a vision, big goals for my class, and then some indicators of success in the classroom. Unsurprisingly, this more abstract process, while very significant, can get easily forgotten after swarms of students and lessons and duties flood in.

After an INCREDIBLE 2 month vacation (Korea has their long break in the winter-time) which you can read about on my personal blog, I am ready to start a new school year and finish my grant year strong. In order to do so, I think it's critical to reassess my vision and goals, assess my progress and and adjust where necessary.

Teacher friends, if you have a chance, I really reccomend this process as a good re-centering exercise! My favorite graduate school professor said that what truly defines a good teacher is their ability to reflect on their teaching. Regardless of skills, strengths, and weaknesses, if you can reflect and adjust your practice, you will have an impact as an educator.

So, without further ado, here are my visions and goals for the new year.

My (Updated) Classroom Vision 

Convictions

My role in the classroom is to empower students "emotionally, socially, intellectually, and politically" through active, holistic english-learning activities. 

As bell hooks states in "Teaching to Trangress," I hope to "enter classrooms with the conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer."

I will also work towards self-actualization as an educator, realizing that, again quoting hooks, "there is an aspect of our vocation that is sacred; our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students." 

Vision

Students will leave my classroom feeling: validated, confident, and happy. 

Traits I hope to develop in my students are: open-mindedness, social consciousness, confidence, and self-awareness. 

Big Goals

1. Students will improve their ability to speak English confidently and comfortably. 

2. Students will celebrate individual and global differences and know better how to meet them later on. 

3. Students will improve their ability to work in groups, problem-solve, and treat others with kindness and respect. 

Indicators

1. More than 80% of students actively raise hands and participate. 

2. Small groups and partners are on task 90% of the time. 

3. Students know what to do when they enter the classroom and throughout the class period. 

4. Students will use English in the classroom 80% of the time. 

5. Verbal indicators such as kind or encouraging words to friends, engagement with the content in private conversations, expressions of enthusiasm for course or subject. 

There you have it. Now, to plan routines and first day lessons! I'd love to hear suggestions or your classroom goals! 

Fulbright Alumni Relations Featured ETA!

I'm so honored to have been featured on the Fulbright Alumni Website as a featured teacher. This year has been so significant in finding my voice in the classroom. You can check out the full article here! 

Thankful!

This Thanksgiving I wanted to address some issues of injustice and inaccuracies involved with the "traditional" American Thanksgiving narrative. Though difficult in a second language, I think its important to always tell the truth as an educator, even when its hard.

So, we spent this month in the EFL classroom learning about Native American history and the real "first Americans." We played traditional games and discussed differences between tribes. My older students even discussed stereotypes and cultural appropriation when it comes to Native Americans in popular culture.

The unit culminated with a more traditional, but still quirky Thanksgiving party a la Charlie Brown! We ate bread and popcorn and jelly beans and made a "thankful tree" for the classroom.

I'm certainly thankful for the students I teach and the lessons about kindness, curiosity, and joy that they teach me every day.

Here's our video!

Thanksgiving from Maeve K Wall on Vimeo.

6th Grade Lesson: I'm Faster than You!

6th grade has proven the most challenging for me to teach. With most of my prior experience in Early Childhood and Early Elementary education, I'm used to singing songs and leading cheers and happily engaging with my class. The 6th grade (12 year old) students in their last semester of Elementary school clearly respond to my teaching differently than a group of 5 year-olds. Thus, I've had to make a lot of adjustments to my teaching style and method to meet their needs. I'm also learning that with older children, respect is gained largely from close, personal relationships. And so I'm working to show my students I trust and respect them in the classroom and working to find opportunities to get to know them better as individuals. While we're not there yet, I'm proud of what we've accomplished together and am excited about what I'm learning.

This Chapters's Topic: "I'm Faster Than You" was another excellent one for providing authentic practice (with a little creative thinking.) Though we still have some kinks to work out, I'm proud of what we studied the past two weeks.

Lesson 1: Introducing New Vocabulary and Phrases

To get the kids excited, (and in a desperate attempt to be cool) I began the unit with a Korean class' cover of Daft Punk's by "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger." Students were amazed with the performance and were able to correctly identify our target language by the end of the song. Then, I continued eliciting vocabulary in an exciting way- with a race in the classroom! I asked two students to perform several tasks- running and jumping, in front of the class. We determined the winners and I asked students to tell me in a complete sentence who was faster. Then, after learning key vocabulary and phrases, I asked students to line up in the back of the classroom from tallest to shortest. BUT they had to do it silently, in one minute! They loved the challenge. I then had them practice "I'm taller than A and I'm shorter than B" down the line. We continued practicing at our seats with a partner speaking game and some partner competitions to determine who was stronger, younger, etc.

Lesson 2: Speaking and Reading Practice

Students picked up the speaking phrases quickly and so I was eager to apply those skills in more complex situations in our second class. Per the recommendation of my brilliant co-teacher, I made a lesson using the fable of the Wind and the Sun. After a quick warm up activity, students watched a subtitled video of the parable and were asked to pick out the comparative and past tense phrases. Here's the lesson.

After discussing grammar points, students then answered the question "who do you think is stronger, the wind or the sun" in discussion groups. I was happy to see them talking and more eager to share than usual.

Lesson 3: Reading and Writing Practice

Having now discussed the topic of myths, I thought that an excellent way to engage students from a new angle would be through the introduction of a traditional Native American folk story. I was hoping to teach students a little bit about a new culture while continuing to practice comparative language. Thus, I re-wrote one myth, "The Heron and the Hummingbird," as a readers-theatre piece! It was my first time using reading practice in this format and I was very pleased with the results. The structure allows students to gain confidence and practice comfortably and had them engaged and speaking for almost the entire 50 minutes. You can get the piece here. 

Lesson 4: Language Creation

In the last lesson of the unit, I like to give my students projects to complete in order to apply the language they've learned meaningfully. This week, we had SO much fun doing so! After a quick "Word Lotto" review, students were asked to create a storyboard/comic strip using the target language (3 comparative words and 3 past tense verb forms). They could make a creation myth similar to the ones we had read or make an entirely new story. The students had a blast and I'll let the creations speak for themselves :-)

Trusting the Process

For the past two years my teaching has mostly been defined by rules. My students followed rules regarding how to sit,how to walk in a line, how to write, how to ask questions, how to speak. As their teacher, I was charged with just as many. There were strict expectations telling me how to write a lesson plan, how to instruct, how to incorporate the textbook, how to ask questions, how to speak.

In fact, at times I felt that my teaching and lesson content were so restricted that I lost sight of my own vision for learning in the first place. I began teaching because I believed whole-heartedly that educators could make a difference in the lives of students and communities but questioned what impact I could make given such narrow and confining circumstances.

I believe that good schools recognize the self-worth of their teachers, but more than that, their students, and operate on the premise of trust and appreciation for each member of the school community. Responsive schools recognize the wealth of experience and talent each individual holds, and then creates spaces for those gifts to be refined and expanded.

I'm happy to report that while I still need time to un-learn and re-learn and heal, I am invigorated every day in my Korean school. Given more autonomy, trust, and confidence as a teacher here has allowed me to be creative in the classroom again and I think the students and I are both reaping the benefits.

Here's a little bit of what we've been up to in my less-regulated classes lately!

1. International Clothing Design

My 3rd and 4th grade after-school classes are stoked about having pen-pals in NYC and so we're beginning a cultural comparison of Korea and the US. We started with clothing- after learning about some traditional American clothing and clothing of American immigrants from cultures around the world, students were asked to complete 1 of 2 tasks. They could either create a side to side comparison of Korean and American clothing (see: Jeans vs. Hanbok) or they could create a new set of clothing using ideas from the fashion we studied.

It was amazing to see the kids light up with creativity and as always, I was stunned by their talent.

Left:International pants and "Naver Man" Right: A Modern Hanbok and Korean leggings :-)

2. Food Combination Creations

My 1st and 2nd grade classes are so fun! Students are JUST learning English but there is a wide enough range of skills in the class so that strategic partnering and student leadership has allowed us to be very successful in learning. This week we studied food. I had originally planned what might have been a boring lesson reviewing food vocabulary and then drawing a favorite food. However, inspiration struck in the form of "Do you like broccoli?" a kid's ESL song that combines gross food combinations (broccoli ice-cream, donut soup) while teaching food words. 

Thus, students sang the ever-hilarious Broccoli Ice-Cream song and then came up one by one to ask the class if they would like some other funny food combination. Each time, they had to practice asking "do you like ____" with the names of the foods they picked. Finally, they went wild with food combos of their own and labeled each! 

She's actually happy. 

3. Creatively Comparative 

In 6th grade, we're working on comparatives like bigger, faster, and stronger. Though I use the textbook for a guideline, I'm given the freedom to go rouge when I think it's more fitting :-). So this week, we started with Daft Punk's "Harder, faster, stronger" song, and then after learning key expressions, played a Comparative Olympics game to practice. Students arm wrestled, raced, and thumb warred all over the place, giving them real-life opportunities to utilize the phrases "I'm faster than you," etc. with guided practice. We also worked on community building by silently lining up from tallest to shortest and then trying to say "I'm taller than ___ and I'm shorter than ____" for each person in line in under a minute! We didn't quite make the challenge but we had fun trying!

In the follow-up lesson, I recognized that students had a fairly good grasp of the key expressions so I added some cultural exchange elements to make the class more exciting and productive. After briefly talking about Native Americans in the US, I told students that we would read a Native American folk tale. I'm excited to say that I rewrote the story "The Heron and the Hummingbird" with comparative adjectives in a reader's theatre format! And so my students then read, rehearsed and performed the folk tale for their classmates. A difficult age group to please, I was happy to see them actively participating for the entire class period!

You can get my lesson materials here!

Native American Heritage Month

Social Justice and English Language Learning

"The world becomes what you teach."

I believe that a good educator should not only presents facts and content knowledge, but help to strengthen students' sense of justice, citizenship, and empathy. Indeed, helping students understand themselves and their worlds often means stepping away from text books and confronting current social and political realities.

When teaching a home-room class, it can be easy to find times to discuss these issues (if they are not already integrated into your curriculum). Read-alouds, holiday parties, class conflicts, recess, bathroom trips, can all serve a higher purpose.

During my limited blocks of language instruction, however, this task has proved more challenging. Students have less language to work with in explaining and discussing issues and also have a variety of cultural contexts.

So while this is a challenge that I'm still working to address, here are some ways I've tried to tackle social justice in my ELL classroom:

1. Featuring people of color predominantly in my lessons. Many of my students have learned that White= American, White=English speaker, White=leader, actor, singer, etc. I try to give them a more realisitic picture of society- in which people of color play a huge part.

2. Working with key phrases. This past week, my students learned statements of ability (think: I can run, I can jump, etc.) I seized the lesson as a chance to discuss gender roles. Students were ask to make a list of what they have heard that boys and girls can or cant do. I gave some examples of stereotypes as well- "Boys can run fast," "Girls can't play sports." I asked them what they thought and watched as they talked (sometimes in Korean) with each other about the realities of gender differences, Eventually, we made posters with one surprising statement about gender on each. The boys: "Boys can wear pink," was maybe less inspired, but I was amazed with the girls who eventually said, "Can we just say, girls can do everything?" Yes, yes you can. :-)

3. Dialogue. I'm currently working on a pen pal exchange program between my friend's 2nd grade class in Harlem and my after-school club. I'm hoping that this exposure to new ways of thinking and ideas will help both groups have a better understanding of our world.