WWMS Community identities

The speaker discusses valuing student-teacher and community identities. They shadowed two teachers with different teaching styles. The core content was teacher-led but included discussions and real-life connections. They also mention a lesson on social and emotional health. The speaker highlights the use of Google Classroom and multiple methods of delivering information. They feel that culture could have been incorporated more in the classroom. They acknowledge the potential for improvement but refrain from critiquing due to their limited perspective. So, for the first slide here, we're talking about valuing student-teacher and community identities. I wanted to kind of start this off by talking about I was able to shadow two different teachers, mainly Joseph Nardino, but as well as J.R. Papernik at the middle school here. And they had slightly different teaching styles, I would say. Most of the core content that was delivered to the students was in a kind of top-down teacher-to-student kind of experience. I know that there's a specific phrase for that, but it was teacher-led. It wasn't really student-led in that situation. However, with that said, a lot of the class revolved around a good amount of discussion and just trying to relate things to real life for them rather than just either made-up scenarios or just facts and statistics and data. So just try to put them in real-world situations, whether it was role-playing or just asking about their experiences in life and how they've connected to, whether it was something like alcohol, drugs that they've experienced, family members or people in the community that they know of. So there was this opportunity for students to share that in the classroom setting and voice and participate. There was one lesson in particular where the unit was about creating the healthiest human and it definitely had to deal with more like social and emotional health, those pieces, which was something new that I hadn't experienced in my time there personally since this was my own middle school, which I think really reflects the community that is in those schools now that are very driven, very hardworking. These are 6th through 8th graders. The tendency to get burnt out is very high and it's a long school year. So talking about that mental health side of things is really critical. But within this assessment, it's kind of a five-part or a five-day piece where Joe would ask the students first, like, you know, what do you think of, like, think of somebody in your life who you find to be a very healthy person and what are some characteristics of what they do? It was an opportunity for all students to kind of, if they wanted to, talk about someone that they regarded in their life to be very helpful, very healthy, famous athletes, family members. A lot of people actually ended up choosing a family member. It might have been something like their grandmother practices yoga every day or goes for a walk. It could have been something simple like that, all the way up to people talking about football players and how athletic they were or cricket players, for example. So that was an opportunity for them to kind of connect their culture, if they wanted to, or just allow the students to kind of move that forward. Another thing that I'd like to note in this section is just in terms of giving students responsibility for their own learning, Joe uses a Google Classroom for most of his class work. And what I really liked about it was that he uses multiple different methods of getting the information across to students. So if they're learning about something in their drug unit, usually there's going to be multiple modes of getting some of that information to the students. So they had opportunities to watch videos on that. They had the opportunities to just read through articles, data, statistics, that kind of stuff that they prefer. And one of the nice ones was even more of a narrative style approach where it was some sort of fake community that was being put together, but it was just relating to this would be a city in New Jersey if it had all the worst, like, drug characteristics. So just another way to get that information across to students. But that was about it. I don't – through reading most of these questions, I don't necessarily know if culture was really brought into the discussion or into the classroom as much as it could have been. So I think that there are a lot of points where things could have been done differently and perhaps done better. But that might just be a situation of not necessarily being able to relate to the students as well and not necessarily for me to critique yet.