Elegant elephants

Srinidhi Nambirajan

Schools in American Cities

Jody Cohen

5/1/2015

Strategies for Change: A Student Centered and Activism-Based Focus

I am placed with a teacher I believe to be quite remarkable in the way she relates and engages with students. However, despite the many positive attributes to her teaching style, there are also aspects that are outdated. She has been teaching for thirty years and has not recieved adequate support to improve her teaching strategies even though she has actively sought out workshops and other ways to improve herself as a teacher. I would like to focus on what it means for teachers to be penalized for faulty classroom practices and not encouraged to change or revise their ways. Districts need to provide support to teachers regardless of whether it is their first year or their 30th year in the classroom and I would like to explore ways to make this possible.

For my field paper the question I will be addressing is how much teaching towards the test hinders the student’s ability to critically think. I also wanted to include how much these policies hinder the school in general but I am not sure how to do so. While at Oakley* Elementary School I have continuously experienced structured lesson plans that do not leave room for change. I have been going to my placement weekly and sometimes biweekly (Tuesday’s and Friday’s) and have experienced the same structure every time. This structure revolves around direct teaching and how to prepare for their tests (although this is interpreted and not directly stated). The students work out of their writing workbooks ranging from worksheets about basic grammar to worksheets about readings.

In reading Crawford-Garrett's book, I was struck by the distancing that was going on between the TFA corps members and the students and families in the surrounding community. Some of the corps members seemed unable to empathize with these families and see ways in which they supported and loved their children that may have differed from how the corps members themselves were raised. One corps member, Wendy, was disturbed by the children's lack of access to "classic" children's literature and the lack of what she conceived of as literacy in their homes. But, as Crawford-Garrett writes, "Wendy was viewing literacy primarily as a set of skills or activities that we acquire rather than something that we put to use in our interactions with others.

On my first day, Mrs. A explained to me that they had a new format of answer reading questions for the PSSAs, which were in six weeks, that had only been given to the teachers last week. Mrs. A was upset about this fact and seemed frustrated. She explained that the school scores had been dropping for a while now and she worried that if they dropped more the school might become a charter and she would be out of a job. This would be particularly difficult for her because she has been teaching so long any might have a hard time getting hired anywhere else because she’s too expensive.