Yesterday, Friday, December 9, 2011, the magnanimous Phyllis K. Lerner made an appearance in the Reading in the Content Area II class for the secondary SIMAT students. Phyllis taught our first section of Reading in the Content Area which all secondary SIMAT candidates took during the summer session. She led a small workshop which I will post more info/analysis on later today.
Phyllis's impact to me and my teaching skill has been important. She taught and had us use different before, during, and after reading strategies which can be implemented with our students while going through a text or new resource of information. She had us use six different graphic organizers which, she hoped, we would later have our own students use. Half the time in her class I found myself taking notes not on the content of the activity or lesson, but on her method of instruction and her tools she used to engage students and assess their accumulation of knowledge. When she spoke to us yesterday, she recalled how many of us had put on our course evaluation our appreciation of her teaching us different strategies on how to teach passing out papers. Trivial as it may seem, this is also a strategy highlighted in the book, Teach Like a Champion. It seemed everything she did was to make us better teachers. As Shelly Blake-Plock, the man behind @teachpaperless, told my fellow classmates and I in his Teaching in the 21st Century: The Paperless Classroom course, "everything you do [in your class as teachers] should have some pedagogical purpose," it felt as if everything Phyllis did had a distinct purpose which moved us all closer to being teachers.
Also, she was one of my best teachers, ever. Her honesty and need to build a class culture which was welcoming, fun, productive, and engaging made going to her class for eight hours a week during the summer not just bearable, but an all-around wonderful experience. She organized a "breakfast club" which had everyone bring in food to share once during the course. This opened up the class to being a bit more friendly and welcoming. If anyone had trouble staying awake, they had just to get up and grab some food to help them stay alert.
Phyllis had an impact on me and on many of the other SIMAT students. However, if it were not for our adviser/professor's e-mailing Phyllis and welcoming her to class, we may not have seen her again. After such a deep relationship has been built in a classroom between teachers and those students who will work with them there is often just a release at the end of the year. Unfortunately, there are not as many ways for students and teachers to reconnect professionally for emotional closure and for any other mentoring opportunity. I realize teachers need to have their personal lives and personal time, but I believe students, and maybe even teachers, would benefit form a meeting after their specific classroom time together had ended. Similar to an alumni network between students and teachers.
If anyone has thoughts on how this could be done while respecting the individual teacher's space, or if you have any thoughts on the subject in general, please add them as a comment below.
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