"Great teachers often explain their success in terms of relationships" (Ritchhart, p.201). Without in any way laying claim to being a "great teacher" I'm working on building the relationships in my small senior class by having individual student meetings a) to review a past essay or story in English Extension, and b) to build a sense of engagement with each student by valuing their past work and setting some learning goals for the year for this subject.
Today's meeting was with Zoe. One of the questions I am asking my students is to reflect on their own writing. What are you proud of? What would you do differently the next time around? Zoe proved to be very self-reflective, quite clearly able to see how she had made connections at a conceptual level between the two novels in her essay. She was also able to articulate the next steps in her own writing, particularly in relation to structure. As we talked through her essay, we were also able to see how considering the intentions of an author might open up the discussion, particularly when we are talking about potentially controversial characters (such as Holden Caufield, and her current reading of Humbert Humbert).
In class, there has been some progress on the metaphor of utilsing 'passing moves' to improve student interactions in thinking about classroom patterns of discourse. In the last two lessons, there have been a number of instances where the students have made use of the connecting phrases (see previous blog entry) and done so in a self-conscience manner. I would take this as being an important step - even when it is done with a smile - later we might hope that the passing moves become routine and we no longer even need to notice them. The lesson ended with us laughing together over a student's reaction to my offer to extend their lesson into their recess break each week. I take this as a good sign of the building of relationships for mutual respect and conversations as "unrehearsed intellectual adventure" (Oakeshott 1959).
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