In the 2021-2022 school year, I taught 7th-9th grade English Language Arts and World History. This page highlights some of my experiences and explains the setting in which I worked.
I taught for one year at El Camino Bilingual School during the 2021-2022 academic year. While there, I taught 6 classes a day: in the morning, I taught English Language Arts to 7th-9th grades, and in the afternoon I taught World History to the same students.
Most of the students at the school are Honduran nationals, though there are also some expat students at the school as well. Thus, I was primarily teaching ELs - I had only one student who spoke English as a native language (L1).
During this time, El Camino was blessed to be almost entirely in person despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. There were points in the first semester we cancelled classes due to potential exposure and instead sent home packets of work for the students to complete at home. (Packets of prepared work was the preferred method for our school as many of our students do not have internet access at home.) Fortunately, this period did not last long.
Our school had access to internet and several types of devices for our students to use while at school, but my classroom did not have a SMART board or projector of any kind. I had a laptop computer, and my students would use the Kindle Fire Tablets (our "textbooks") or Windows Surfaces (for research and general internet access) throughout the day. As previously mentioned, not every student had access to internet at home, and some of those who did have access only could do so on a parent's or sibling's phone. We also battled frequent power outages throughout the year. Because of these things, I could not expect or assign much digital work during my time there.
This experience was very different from my experience in the States, but it taught me a great deal: I learned to be very intentional with the time I spend with my students in class, to be flexible with my plans, and how to troubleshoot technical difficulties quickly without losing instructional time. This year also taught me how going "old school" without technology or screens can be refreshing and meaningful for students who are so constantly bombarded with screens and media otherwise.
I think the biggest thing I learned while teaching in the younger grades of my certification area was the importance of building up strong foundational skills. Going from teaching high school seniors one year to teaching middle schoolers the next was a jarring transition. Additionally, between the gaps in learning left by COVID-19 and a somewhat transient staff in years prior, there were many concepts I expected my students to have already mastered of which they had absolutely no prior knowledge. This was intimidating, but I decided to tackle the problem one skill at a time. I began with the concepts I wanted to teach that were grade-level appropriate. Then, I would trace backwards to the building blocks of these skills until I found the gaps I needed to fill. Even though doing so meant that I would be "wasting time" on concepts not required by the grade-level standards, I also knew my students and I would get nowhere without first laying a solid foundation.
I honestly think that taking the time to do some more foundational skills work with my students was what allowed them to flourish in the rest of the school year. With my 8th and 9th graders, even my highest performing students began the year struggling to write a focused paragraph that integrated textual evidence, and none of them knew how to properly use quotation marks or parenthetical citations. Additionally, run-on and fragment sentences were rampant in their writing. However, by taking time in the first semester to focus on grammar and model the use of textual evidence with sentence frames and mentor texts, both classes wrote essays by the end of the year that integrated textual evidence.
Though I was also the history teacher at El Camino, history is not in my area of certification, and if I'm being perfectly honest, I didn't learn to like history until I was into my college years. But, the chance to teach history has been so much fun and very helpful to my own practice. Most notably, it has challenged me to create more interdisciplinary activities. This began simply between English and history, the two subjects I taught, because it allowed me to target and emphasize reading comprehension and writing skills that my students were struggling with. It was great to watch them learn a skill or in ELA in the morning and then apply it in their assignments later that afternoon in History. But later, I began to try to work more closely with other teachers in the upper school, successfully navigating the language- and cultural- barriers and creating projects that spanned subjects and even grade levels.
This whole process opened my eyes to how powerful collaboration between subjects can be for students, which then inspired me to seek that type of integration with other teachers. I collaborated several times with other content teachers: when the Technology teacher was introducing Google Slides, I assigned my students a presentation project in History; when the Bible teacher was doing a unit on Psalms, we studied several psalms as poetry in ELA. My students' learning was enriched and my own teaching was challenged and improved because of the chance to work with so many other educators.
Photo 1: 8th Grade class during English; learning common symbols for annotating a text before practicing on a nonfiction article.
Photos 2-3: 9th grade students performing a skit of the death of Julius Caesar. After reading the chapter from the history textbook and watching a cartoon remake of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar for inspiration, students then wrote and performed their own scenes using details from the texts to tell the story accurately.
Photo 4: 7th grade students playing a word sorting game to review the 8 different parts of speech.
Photo 5: Poster created by 9th grade student for a research unit in History. Students chose a country around the world, researched how Christmas is celebrated there, then compared it to their own customs in Honduras. Finally, they presented to the class.
Photo 6: Anchor chart used during our "Paragraph Bootcamp" week. During this week, students learned about the 4 steps of the writing process and the key parts of a paragraph. Throughout the week, they wrote several informative and persuasive paragraphs as assessments.
Photo 7: 7th grade students in History taking notes on the key features of a map.
Photo 8: 8th grade students practicing conversation skills by interviewing each other after returning from winter break.
Photo 9: Paper chariots created by students after learning about the gladiatorial games held in Ancient Rome.
Photo 10: 7th grade class practicing active reading in History. As we read the book aloud, I would pause us for discussion, comprehension checks, and Think-Pair-Share predictions.