Brigham Reflection #3

This was a different week for me last week. I have spent my last few times at Brigham in the Preschool room and this week was a nice change of pace. What I really liked about the Kindergarten was that the students were extremely responsive to every the co teachers were teaching them. I have to applaud them for really tying in the Spanish language and not making it seem unnatural. I have very little to no experience working with bilingual students. It was eye opening to say the least. I was working with one group of students and asked them a question. To their peers they answered something in Spanish. I was floored at how fast the code switching was going on in their minds. I am very rusty in my Spanish and I can not translate it fast enough in my head to figure out what the students were saying. With this being said, if the students had only had their Spanish language I would have been at a loss for how to help them or even communicate the basic lesson. I feel that an experience like this brings awareness to the fact that I feel very limited put in certain situations. The only way to feel more prepared to handle situations like language barriers is to through yourself into a variety of learning environments. 

Since this was one of the last times in the classroom, now is a good time to reflect on the progress I have made towards my goals. To review my goals were to use clear instructions to target all students, to gain confidence working with people who are different than me and gain experience in working with and accommodating for diverse students. It seemed like I made these goals so long ago, I can not believe where the time as gone. It has been an interesting road so far at Brigham. One downside to only being in the classroom every other week is that we do not get to form any relationships with the students we were teaching. I feel like I struggled to write a lesson plan for students I hardly knew but this will be a reality for us someday when planning the first weeks of lesson plans for the school year. Another thing we could have done would have been to talk to the teachers that were in the room the weeks prior to our teacher. My concern with this is the issue of students confidentiality and respecting their privacy. There has to be a better way or forum for sharing observations of the students in a safe and approximate manner. I will spend more time on this matter in my final reflective paper. In the next time we are in the classroom it will be for the engineering lesson. I hope that I can reach the students and that our lesson plan was written in a way that supports them. It will be a much smaller group so we will really be able to gather some good assessment details from this lesson as well as what it is like to teach with three other teachers. 

I found a video that has a bilingual emphasize: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W97zQ6ZmoJM. The teacher prompts the students and the students really respond to this.   

Exceeds:   I included a video to further our understanding of what a bilingual classroom looks like.