Posted to Uvic Moodle February 2 2012.
I really enjoyed our visit to Frank Hobbs Today Thursday January 26th. The teacher for whose name I cannot remember right now was fantastic. Her enthusiasm radiated not only throughout her class, but our class too. She really seems to enjoy her occupation.
To start she asked her students who remembered Disco Dance, Freeze dance and the ChaCha slide. As I’m sure she already knew would happen, everyone responded with their hands straight up in the air. I like how she “injects” the energy right off the bat. She wouldn’t settle for lazy responses to her questions, repeating until energized to her liking. I like this point. If anything kids are going to expend energy, so if we start them at a higher energy level I feel we’ll be more productive for longer, especially as we get use to teaching.
When discussing rules to the dances she didn’t have many and she really emphasised them by asking questions to them about the rules. I like that she choose to ask the questions that would most likely have been asked by the “trouble makers” or the “rule benders”. She hits these questions right on the head by asking them “when you’re stopped are you allowed to breath? Blink?” Everyone had their chuckle of acceptance and the fun continued.
Choice of music, amazing. I was really curious about this. All I can remember from my dance days is boring music played on an old cassette tape recorder in the gym for FOLK DANCE. I remember one teacher attempting to mix the curriculum up by doing FOLK DANCE in FRENCH. Not to say I don’t like French because I do like French, but Folk Dance and French? Really? Then again I was one of the English students in Ecole Keating. I imagine choosing music can be very time consuming and so I take her recommendation on the Gummy Bear’s CD purchase (ahem I mean download). Seems it’s rather popular.
While we joined in on the fun I was beside one boy who seemed to be having a great time. He was on task and really concentrating on what he was doing, until he was interrupted by the arrival of a relocating classmate. I could see the gears start to turn as he grappled with “should I pay attention to you? my friend! or the teacher?” He ended up siding with his friend. Dance class was now Goof off class. June jumped right in between these boys to separate them. They didn’t really know what to do, so they just moved around her and continued with their own fun. June persisted but before she could get them on task it was the end of class.
It is very evident that she has spent, probably doesn’t have to spend as much time now, much time planning every little detail of her lessons. What a great experience.
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Seeing as I missed class on Tuesday I’ll reflect a little on our first Creative Dance lesson at Frank Hobbs on Wednesday February 1st.
The initial planning stage went alright. Seeing as we really had no frame of reference we were really shooting in the dark, trying to take clues from Melissa, the regular teacher. Luckily she was more than willing to offer suggestions and give us the details on behavioural issues. She also left the court open as to what content we wanted to cover. As suggested by June we used the first lesson to gauge the level of ability in the class to use in our future planning.
It’s really neat to see what happens when trying to implement planning. Now I must make note that I did miss the peer teaching part to this whole exercise and so didn’t reap the benefit of the direct peer feedback. My group filled me in on the gist of it, but it really never replaces being there. I really wish I had have been there for the peer teaching as I felt lost at points when things that we hadn’t planned for were taking place. Example: I never suspected that A) the kids would purposely mix up all their names on us B) getting into 4 lines and waiting four beats could be such a drawn out process. When we broke into our four groups –using the four corners of the gym – I found it difficult to keep the boys from moving into the other three groups areas. There seemed to be a bit of a competition between two of the boys. I think next time I will clearly indicate our group boundaries. I also must mention that of the list that was given to us of children to watch due to behaviour, I had two in my group. Someone was bound to have two in their group. I can really feel for the teachers that have more than just a few, which as I understand it is very common.
Something that I think was very confusing to the students was MY use of the whistle. I say MY as I think I used it the most while we were running the 4 lines routine. Melissa had indicated that her students know what to do when they hear the whistle. They are to sit down immediately and stop talking. She even made the class repeat this when on first blow the class didn’t respond as quickly as desired. Now, where I chose to use the whistle was to start and stop the line drills. I could see moments of confusion as they knew they had to go forward but the whistle was telling them to sit down. I caught myself teetering on and off using the whistle. I was starting to get confused for what exactly I wanted them to do on the whistle blow myself.
I got the impression that Melissa was trying to “present” a certain image of her class to us. I can’t blame her. Here are four to-be teachers with no experience entering her classroom. She even casually mentioned that she hopes we don’t think she is hard on her kids. That couldn’t be any further from the truth. All her students seem to have the upmost respect for her. She was very firm, fair and friendly. Great teacher!
I found that she intervened with the disobedient students here and there. She really knew when we needed it, but for the most part she didn’t intervene giving us the exposer. I appreciate this as it exposes us to correcting misbehaviours. I have to mention what we learned in Psychology: we correct disruptive behaviour not problem behaviour.
All in all I am getting more and more excited as we venture further down the road to being teachers. As I mentioned in my forum posting, this semester has really been interesting in that there is much evidence of cross-curricular applications to much of what we are doing/ learning in our classes.
I look forward to visiting Frank Hobbs for our second visit. I know I’ll feel much more confident than the first lesson as we have some framework to plan with now.