My Ideal Classroom
The main priority in forming my ideal classroom would be the classroom’s community along with motivation. In order to best educate your students, I believe that as teachers we must provide the appropriate environment and community. The learning environment is key to the student’s comfort level not only as far as the curriculum goes, but also in forming relationships with other students as well. As far as creating a classroom community, the key point would be to include all aspects of the children’s lives from home to school. It is important to consider and take into account a child’s home life when creating a comfortable learning community for each one of your students. Including the parents in their child’s education is vital to the child’s success in school. If a student receives support from at home from parents and even siblings, they have much more opportunities for success. As Joellen Maples suggests in her article, even going as far as to assigning family homework or homework for the parents can be effective in connecting the students home and school communities. My ideal classroom would also expand upon the notion of community as just the environment of the classroom to the aura of it as well. My classroom will be full of encouragement and motivation both at the intrinsic and extrinsic levels to complete the feeling of unity among the students and myself.
I hope to take away from this course a deeper understanding as to ways to incorporate all aspects of language arts in my classroom. I look forward to a deeper insight into the methods and ways to teach language arts beyond the standard reading books and worksheets. One of my favorite features of language arts is how it incorporates into all other subject areas. I look forward to extending my understandings of ways to expand on these notions.
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I agree with pretty much everything your saying. I also think that a good classroom atmosphere consists of a strong sense of community and acceptance. After reading and discussing the materials meant for this past weeks class, I think I have a better sense of how we can do this. I think that especially with ELL students it's important to build a community by making them comfortable and free to ask questions. As I was reading "Assessing English-language learners in mainstream classrooms" I realized that we can provide ELL students with the tools they need to build their confidence. By providing them with support through scaffolding, we allow them to learn for themselves but in a way they can do it correctly while appearing that they did it on their own. One thing I don't really understand though is how we use assessments without making our student's feel as though we are judging them. Like you I feel that we must motivate or student's. Do you think that assessments could be used as a motivator? I don't want the student's to ever let a poor performance or misunderstanding of material affect their confidence. I suppose we must continue to learn about different strategies in order to do this?
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