Work Smart....Not Hard
I have always applied this philosophy in my life and I think some people may think of it as being lazy. I firmly disagree! I have learned this year that cooperative learning can be very fruitful for students of all abilities and while students are working and learning cooperatively, for an outsider looking in, it may not look like I, as the teacher, am working very hard. However, I have also learned that cooperative learning is only successful for students and teacher if the cooperative learning environment is structured, the students know the variety of roles and jobs each have, a goal is set before the cooperative learning begins and most importantly.....it's fun and engaging for the students. This is not always an easy task and does require some hard work up front but the majority of the time...the results are impressive. This year I had students working together whose parents called me at the beginning of the year to say that they want their child moved away from another. I had students who normally would rather cruise through an assignment on their own stopping and taking the time to make sure another student understood the concept. I even had students who would rather be playing video games or playing sports outside laughing, smiling and participating. It wasn't always sunshines and rainbows but when I look back at those moments, it wasn't my students who weren't getting the job done, it was me who failed. Part of this came from not teaching Grade 4 before and the other part came from me not working very smart or hard. I hadn't set the students up for success in my planning and thus their frustration in not being successful turned into a shared frustration....lesson learned!
Another part of me working smart not hard this year, ties into the cooperative learning aspect but setting up a team environment where students are comfortable asking each other for help and are comfortable helping each other before they come to me for help. I spent about the first 3 weeks doing role playing and discussing what this looks like. We definitely had to come back to it a few times throughout the year as some students "forgot" how it worked but it was a great to see students helping each other out and gave me a little more time to help some of the students who still really weren't comfortable asking a peer for help or just needed some extra help.
Taking the backwards by design planning to heart. I learned the hard way that there are some excellent activities, lessons, lesson plans out there but if I did not know exactly what I wanted my students to learn from it and how I was going to check to see if they have learned it (I believe this is called assessment) and then what I could do if they haven't quite understood the concept or idea....then I was in for some long nights and days. I learned this the hard way and sometimes I got caught in the excitement of how awesome an activity looks like or sounds....that I forgot about how I was going to check for understanding or what they were supposed to get out of the activity and then when it came to assessing them or giving them feedback....I ended up with very frustrated students and thus a very frustrated me.....lesson learned!
Finally I found that making my students laugh and have a little fun makes life a lot more enjoyable in the classroom overall. I found that breaking into song (trust me what I do isn't generally called singing), telling jokes, letting students tell that painfully long story that kind of repeats itself and doesn't really have a point, getting up and moving around (even though the recess bell didn't go) makes for a group of happy students who want to be in the classroom. None of the above are hard to do but it sure makes life a lot easier on the teacher in the end!
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