Final Blog Post!

After reading through my group's blog posts throughout the semester, it is clear that we are pretty much all on the same page when it comes to teaching, our hopes for the future and what we would like to incorporate into our classrooms. Although I don’t think we disagreed throughout any of our blog postings, I feel as if we were able to really connect our ideas and build off of one another by agreeing and supporting each other.

One important issue that we all agreed upon was our ability to relate to all of our students and recognizing that not all of them are going to come from stable homes. Alice shared a quote from her CT that said, “…Teachers need to understand the kinds of issues that they students are dealing with at home (violence, alcohol, not enough sleep, adult responsibilities…) while still trying to keep them focused on the classroom lesson at hand.” I think this really touches on the way that all of us seem to feel on understanding where our students are coming from before we can educate them and assess them properly and just help them grow within their literacy learning. Dominic also noted many times how important is it for us to understand the cultural and social aspect of our students and their home lives and background.

Another aspect that we all really seemed to agree upon was not underestimating our students when it comes to reading, writing and discussion time throughout literacy. I mentioned in an early post that we sometimes are afraid to introduce critical literacy into the classroom because we think it will be “over their heads” or they won’t be able to relate or understand the material. However, we all agreed that when presented in the appropriate manner, it is beneficial to the students and the teacher to have discussions on a number of topics and controversial issues/texts – even at a young age! Again, we all agreed that if we were to guide/train our students in a grand conversation, they would be able to master it with time and we, as teachers, would be able to receive some really outstanding feedback from them.

As mentioned before, I believe that the three of us were able to take an idea presented by one person and really build off of that in a positive way. I don’t think that there was any disagreements when it came to our teaching practices because the three of us have worked together a lot in the past, and we all support each others ideas when it comes to our future teaching within the classroom. Overall, I believe that, if anything, we were able to effectively share our ideas with each other and really grow from this noteblog assignment. I think that bouncing off of each other’s ideas in a written form allowed me to develop my thoughts more (as opposed to in an oral conversation where your thoughts are sometimes not as developed). I really appreciated what Dominic and Alice had to say and I was able to take their ideas and beliefs into consideration for my own future teaching. Because of our communication that we developed throughout the semester, the ideas we shared and the growth that we have seen, I would give myself a 10 out of 10 for this portion of the noteblog assignment.