Getting my foot through the door - Reflection #1

 Today was a definitely a major milestone in my steps to becoming a fully developed English teacher. Simply put: I failed. Throughout my life I was taught in school that failure was something to be avoided and that I should always strive for perfection, but the harsh reality of life is that no one can be perfect and that we are going to fail from time to time.

I was put in charge of leading the class through a choral reading of a short story while the teacher conducted a test for the district on the few remaining students that couldn't take it last week. Because the content of this test is sensitive information the teacher took each student out into the hallway in order to administer the test. She was just outside the door and within earshot in case anything went horribly wrong so I wasn't too worried about being left completely alone, but even still the students were largely off task while I was trying to get them to focus on the assignment at hand.

I started becoming frustrated that they were not listening to my instructions or following along with what I was trying to teach them about the story so I thought back to my discipline course last semester to see what my options were. My mentor teacher already has a few disciplinary strategies in place so I went with these to try and get the classroom under control. First off I tried her method of counting down from 5 on my hand to signal that when I reach zero all voices should be off and eyes should be on me for further instructions. This initially worked, but shortly after we resumed choral reading students started to get off task again. Since this strategy had failed I moved to my next available punishment: a group contingency combined with the time owed strategy from Randall Sprick's Discipline in the Secondary Classroom (122). I reminded them that their teacher wasn't the only person in the room who could administer punishments for misbehavior and added 30 seconds (she does increments of 30 rather than 15 in order to curb behaviors at a quicker rate and allows the students to earn their time back before class ends) to their final time and still they chose to ignore my instruction.

At this point in time my mentor teacher had finished with the final student and returned to classroom. She immediately had the class under control within a few seconds using nearly the exact same method I had tried to use and gave them a lecture about showing me the same courtesy as they do for her. I'm not 100% sure of this, but I could almost feel my face burning from embarrassment that I was unable to get these students to follow the classroom rules when their teacher could.

After class ended my mentor teacher and I had a brief conference to discuss what I thought I could have done better in order to get the students to listen to me and the only answer I could think of was that maybe I wasn't using a serious enough tone to convey my point them and that I would need to work on my “teacher voice” for the future. After that she asked me if I had a behavior strategy of my own that I could use similar to her counting down method and that if I didn't I should come up with one and implement it in class for tomorrow. As soon as I got home I found Sprick's text and flipped through it looking for a strategy that I could use for myself so that students would know that they were doing something that wasn't conducive to their learning. After an hour of searching I came to the conclusion that it doesn't matter what technique I choose because the underlying cause of the issue was that the students felt they didn't need to show me the same kind of behavior they showed their teacher. Maybe because they don't think of me as one of their teachers, even though I am. Hopefully when she lectured the students about respecting the adults in the room this can open up the opportunity for me to develop these much needed skills.

In the end it doesn't matter that I failed today as much as what I did afterwards to learn from the failure and how I grow from it moving forward.