Reflection

How Will I Incorporate This Experience in my Classroom?

I am very grateful for this experience. My host family, cooperating teacher, and everyone else at RMSI have been amazing and helpful. The relationship and mutual respect my teacher has with her student's is really inspiring. I'm so excited to build that communal trust in my future classroom.

With this experience I was also able to see a very small glimpse of what it is like to be a an English Language Learner (ELL) in our US education system. While traveling and talking to people within Barcelona it was very hard to communicate at times and was a little frustrating. It was very nerve racking to even try to speak a little Spanish. I couldn't even imagine having to permanently move to a new country and have to learn a new language. So, I definitely have a newfound respect for ELL students and all people in the world learning a 2nd+ language.

I cannot wait to show my future students pictures and videos form this trip. Vicarious, international experiences are very important, especially for students who are curious about traveling. A guided field trip of my experiences could easily be incorporated into a social studies lesson, showing different monuments throughout Barcelona, Rome, and The Vatican City. It would also be very interesting to design a lesson on the budgeting of the trip with plane tickets, housing, food, entertainment, USD to Euros, and other costs factored in.

Overall, I have developed a better cultural awareness. I'm so excited to display souvenirs around my classroom of things I brought back with me in my European travels. I believe it's really important for students to be introduced to other cultures and their monuments as early as possible.