ELLEN
BERG
Diary #28
How
Do I Keep Structure
and Avoid Boredom for My Students?
I (reluctantly) returned from Cozumel, Mexico this past Friday. On the flight home, I entertained ways I might be able to stay there permanently. The best of them all was Elena's Taqueria y English School. I could serve up tasty carne asada tacos while schooling local children in proper English. My husband, not to be left out, offered to be the entertainment, changing his band's name to Ken Kase y Los Banditos. In that scenario we would never feel stress, never yearn for a change of scenery. Or not.
While Cozumel is an absolutely lovely place, I wonder if a steady diet of palm trees and warm tropical breezes might eventually lose its glamour. Eventually life would settle into the same structures -- work, pay bills, do housework. While we need those structures, the sameness of them is what creates the boredom, not necessarily the scenery.
Just Just Ella
Just before break I began to notice a restlessness with my students while reading Just Ella. Some of it was due to the approaching break, but I think a lot of it was related to doing the same activity day in and day out.
That puzzled me; every book on classroom management I have ever read stresses structure and consistency, so I though setting up a firm structure would aid my students as they read. If the expectations were clear and consistent, I thought, they would be freed up to concentrate on making meaning.
Not so much.I cannot be certain, but it seems that the sameness of my classroom and the activities we were doing actually became a hindrance to my students. I found myself wondering if having the same structures in place all the time can actually hinder development because students go on autopilot and disengage?
I think of every part-time job I ever had and how, at first, it was fun to me. As I became proficient and understood the general structure of it, however, I quickly became bored and learned how to manipulate those structures to my advantage. My work quality quickly declined.
Is that what is at work in my classroom? I am having a difficult time wrapping my mind around what consistency really means in my classroom. How do I keep the structure and a reasonable comfort level for my students while also making sure activities and structures do not become rote?
The uncertainty principle
Maybe students need a certain amount of uncertainty in order to grow. When the waters are calm, we have no need to change. The real question for me, however, is are my students acting out because nothing is new, or are they acting out because they have quickly mastered the concepts the activities cover? When I return to my classroom tomorrow, I plan to investigate that very question, but then I have a new dilemma: what do I do next? How do I change midstream? I suspect the best course of action is to tweak the activities students have mastered to push their learning to a higher level. However, this is where I begin to have some trouble. While I understand the concepts I teach, I do not have a good idea of the different degrees the concepts may travel. How do we take a concept like prediction and adjust it higher or lower? Isn't prediction just prediction? Well, yes and no. As with everything else in life, there must be different levels of understanding. Differentiation is essentially what I am grappling with. Nothing in my preservice experience prepared me for this, and I have no training or knowledge to rely on. I very much want to push my students' boundaries, but I do not know how. Perhaps some of my readers might have some suggestions about where to start.... I think what I love the most about teaching is the uncertainty. Certainly the general day-to-day routine is the same, but the learning, needs of my students, and demands of my job are constantly shifting. I think that is something I need to investigate more as I refine my understandings of consistency in the classroom.
