First ELL Classroom Visit

I had my first classroom visit last Monday.  I worked with a 16 year old ELL student who moved to Winooski about a year ago.  We did not get to talk much about where he was from (Somalia) or what the immigration and resettlement process was like because we were so focused on the schoolwork the whole time.  The class was studying the US Government and the role of the different branches.  This class, each student was supposed to spend an hour writing a letter to a Vermont Congressman of their choosing about their suggestions for changes in government spending.  They were all given a pie chart breaking down government spending into percentages, which they had been discussing in the past few classes.

INSERT NAME HERE blew me away with his interest and his focus on the subject.  Sometimes we would get to talking about an idea for five or ten minutes and I would have to remind him that he should be writing this stuff down in his letter!  He did struggle with understanding certain topics, mostly because he did not have the vocabulary yet to understand.  I could tell that he was held back a lot by trying to speak English, which is still fairly new to him.  He was better at speaking than writing but sometimes I would ask him to explain one of his ideas to me in more detail, or to clarify something else, and he would start speaking quickly and break off.  I could see in his frustrated glances that his brain was moving way quicker than he could keep up with in English.  But he did not let it get to him, he would just try to explain again in a simpler way.

I was really impressed with the attention and attitudes of all the students actually.  When they first came into the room, at least a third of them saw me and immediately walked up and introduced themselves.  I know that when I was in high school I would not have had that initiative, personally.  I was kinda intimidated by student teachers at first.  I was struck by the matter-of-fact way they approached topics and life in general.  Overall, this first visit got me more excited to teach in a classroom than I have been in a while.  If I get the opportunity to teach students as engaged and curious as the students in this history class then I am going to really enjoy myself.  I am also curious to see how my relationship with INSERT NAME HERE progresses and if we will end up talking more about where we are from or mostly stick to talking about the subject matter at hand. 

Albert Bandura and the Social Learning Theory

Of the different theories on adolescent development that we read about in chapter 2 of Revel, the one that most interested me was Albert Banduras theory of Social Learning.  I think that we as humans learn the most from the ways we watch and interact with one another and this is especially enunciated during adolescence.  Bandura believes that we are conditioned to act in ways we see others acting, which is to say that he agrees with certain behaviorist concepts, but he adds that there is a process in between the observing of behavior and the persons own action in which they translate the behavior.  He refers to this process as mediation.  There are four different ways through which he thinks that mediation occurs: Attention (people pay attention to and repeat behaviors that draw their attention over other things), Retention (whether or not a certain behavior is remembered), Reproduction (whether not we can physically repeat certain behaviors), and Motivation (desire to repeat a certain behavior, which is often influenced by reward or punishment).  As educators, all four of these are important to keep in mind but I think it is especially important to remember how many different things teenagers have drawing their attention during this time in life.  It is our job to create an environment that encourages attention and curiosity.

Years later in the 1980s, Bandura changed the name of his theory to the Social Cognitive Theory.  This is to emphasize the role that choice can play in development.  Teenagers are able to choose the people that they associate themselves with and draw their inspiration from.  Not only that, but they (and all of us) are able to change our own destinies because of the way that we react to events. They are not simply limited to the environment they are given, they have the ability to create change.

High school is an opportunity for adolescents to reconsider who they are and who they want to be.  They have the chance to change friend groups if the people they have been growing up with since childhood are doing different things then they would like.  However, peer pressure is a huge part of high school years as well.  I think it is easy for high school students to stay with the friend groups they are comfortable with even though their interests may be changing.  There will also be more pressure than students have been used to previously to experiment with things like drinking, smoking, and relationships.  It is extremely important for us as teachers to keep our students engaged and to push them to think critically and creatively, so they hopefully will be better prepared to handle these social situations.

https://www.simplypsychology.org/bandura.html

Looking for Alaska Connections

The biggest connection between Looking for Alaska and things we have been discussing in class that stuck out to me was the idea of adolescent brain development.  At age 20 I am barely out of adolescence and my brain is still developing, but in just the few years since high school I have already noticed many changes in the way I process information and relate to others.  I have become less self-centered and more interested in pushing myself understand the perspectives of others.  I place far less emphasis on the perceived opinions of others because I know that they don't define me. I am not intimidated by social situations like I used to be because I don't think of people in terms of their place in the social ladder that was high school.

The really cool thing about John Green's writing in this novel is that it is extremely relatable.  Reading through the perspective of Pudge, the main character, I can immediately put myself in his shoes.  It is like I am back in high school.  He is struggling to make friends, deal with different social pressures like smoking cigs and drinking, and trying to figure out the crush he has on a girl (Alaska).  He is trying to work out who he is and what his place is in the world.

That is not at all to say that I know everything about myself one hundred percent of the time or that I always know what I am doing or anything like that.  But I do believe that it is important as teachers to keep in mind that our students are seeing and experiencing everything from a different perspective.  For me, I think that remembering the stressors and pressures of high school will critical in terms of relating to my students.  This novel helps bring me back and look from a different angle.