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Throughout my observing experience, I witnessed different learning styles of educators in their element of teaching. These learning styles showed me how to enhance the students' relationship with the curriculum and get them excited to learn about today’s topics.
Learning styles have been defined in a number of ways, such as cognitive, effective, and physiological traits that are relatively stable indicators of how learners perceive, interact with, and respond to the learning environment. Through these different learning styles, students can understand and analyze the lesson at their own pace with their own method. We learn in class that instruction needs to be differentiated, but after observing, I realized how completely different each student thinks and acts. Cognitively, students are coming from many different places and hold different misconceptions about the topic under study. Socially, they respond differently to groups—both in how much they enjoy being grouped for projects and how much work they can get done while working with their peers. They are motivated in different ways. Finally, they have interests that are all over the map and likely change week to week. There is a ton of diversity in the classroom— no two students think the same way. My observations showed me that many kids were learning in different ways. Their own unique perspectives on the lesson helped build the conversation of the class and by asking questions they were better able to understand the information that was presented to them. Since kids are so different and there is only one teacher at the front of the class, it can be difficult engaging each student in the task at hand; however, with different activities set up in a unit, an educator can hopefully tackle each student's needs and get them thinking about the information. For this reason, the class structure and offerings need to be much more differentiated in order to keep everyone interested in the material.
I personally have witnessed great project-based concepts in the classrooms as the teachers I observed orchestrated ways to teach a lesson through activities involving peers working together. Students would have to analyze and determine the purpose of the author and find textual evidence to support their claims based off the worksheets provided by the teachers as well as from the book they were reading in class the past week. For example, one class was reading Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and they had to break down a paragraph, find it's meaning, and describe how it affects the reader. The educator I was observing used the below Common Core Standards to help create the lesson for that day:
Determine a central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including its relationship to supporting ideas; provide an objective summary of the text.
Analyze how a text makes connections among and distinctions between individuals, ideas, or events (e.g., through comparisons, analogies, or categories).
Analyze in detail the structure of a specific paragraph in a text, including the role of particular sentences in developing and refining a key concept.
The group activities helped students understand these concepts in their own language, as each one of them analyzed the assignment and used their findings to explain and infer from the literature and from previous classwork. When the task requires learning a new skill, students become very focused and eager to learn, then immediately practice and apply the new skill. With these group activities, everyone in the class is doing different things in small teams, so differentiation is an element that will be seen while the students learn. Sometimes, the group as a whole is responsible for the completion of a single task. In other groups, each person completes the task on their own, but the students cooperate to finish the work. Skills are learned in context and each group will come out with different answers and methods gained from the experience. The goal in my classroom would be to have essential questions that drive the conversation of the class and have students really question the literature from different perspectives. As a future educator, I would like to focus on developing a social connection between the class assigned literature and my students. Coming from this perspective, I recognized a pattern in the classes I observed, where students brought in their culture and identity to understand the collision of cultural groups seen in the literature they read and related it to these groups on a personal level. By building connections between the literature and the reader, students will be able to seek out and identify with the human sense of identity demonstrated by the literary characters, as well as see the vulnerable and complex nature of these identities, relating them to the real world and the nature of humanity. This humanistic approach to literary characters highlights the flawed and real-world identity of people as a whole. By analyzing characters in the context of the literature, students will be able to recognize the relatable aspect of identity in addition to the flaws inherent in human nature. This realistic and authentic approach to teaching literature can facilitate students when connecting to the real world outside of the classroom and encourage them relate to one another on a more intimate, human level. With a classroom filled with students that can relate to one another, we can further build from the literature and completely see the reasons behind the author's purpose in a better light. This classroom mentality can use the following Common Core Standards:
Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.
Determine a central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text.
Analyze how the author unfolds an analysis or series of ideas or events, including the order in which the points are made, how they are introduced and developed, and the connections that are drawn between them.
Here, the students can build upon these standards and fully control and examine the literature with their own critical lens they created through the school year. Overall through observations, I was able to gain a better insight into the way teachers handle and incorporate significant life skills into the class regimen.
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