This was undoubtedly the busiest, but the most productive, summer of my life. After Teach for America's Induction week in Berkeley, nearly 400 corps members spent five weeks in Los Angeles for "Institute," or the time when they teach us how to be teachers. In the mornings, we taught summer school; I taught twelve third graders for four weeks, and I taught a different subject each week. I worked with three other TFA teachers in our classroom, and since we taught the same class, we collaborated and worked together on everything. We all had different work styles, so it was not always easy, but we all learned a lot about ourselves and about group work.
In the afternoons, we had 3-4 hours of sessions on everything from teaching literacy to managing a classroom to planning units and lessons to talking about diversity. The presentations were really useful and well done, for the most part, but exhausting after long mornings of teaching! Then in the evenings, we had to meet with our groups, plan lessons, grade papers, attend workshops, and still get to bed at a reasonable hour. Like I said, incredibly productive, but exhausting.
I did, however, make it off of the Loyola Marymount University campus (where we stayed in dorms and ate in the dining hall) a few times. On the first weekend, I went with a group of people to hike to the Hollywood sign! An absolutely necessary excursion for my first time in LA :) Another weekend I went to Santa Monica beach and saw the end of historic Route 66. On the weekend that Harry Potter came out, I went to see it in a huge, beautiful theater.
TFA's whole theory about training teachers is so interesting. Rather than focusing on a lot of the practical things for everyday lesson planning, they spent most of the time talking about setting big goals, tracking and utilizing data, theories of classroom management, addressing diversity, etc. I guess they figure that we're sharp enough to pick up on those things on our own. I left feeling like I didn't really know exactly what it would look like to run my own classroom, but I did feel like I knew why I was in a classroom and what I wanted my students to accomplish by the end of the year.
One of the best parts of TFA, in my opinion, is the wealth of resources that they've compiled. First of all, you can get in touch with any of the current corps members or alumni and ask them anything; by nature, TFA people are incredibly open, good at communicating, and happy to share. There are also several TFA-created websites where you can ask questions to experts, watch videos of exemplary teaching, and look up anything from lessons for teaching fractions to spelling test templates to samples consequence charts for third grade classrooms. There are so many resources that it gets to a point that you don't even know where to start!
Anyway, those are my reflections on the summer and TFA so far. More to come soon!
No comments:
Post a Comment