Teaching Strategies
Whenever I have had the opportunity and privilege to have a student teacher in my classroom, I always have to remind myself to think and remember all of the things that I, as a senior educator, do automatically and as second nature that a newer or novice educator might not do out of habit yet. I find myself often coming back to a student teacher asking if I thought that we should discuss scissor safety, glue stick procedure, and regular routines again with a group of first graders, because we had already gone over these concepts many times. As you might guess, my answer is always a resounding, yes and always yes. Reminders of procedure, routines, and especially safety practices can never be over-emphasized. It is never a reprimand as much as a reminder. Everything, and I mean every tiny detail, that we expect students to do and do well, needs to be taught, modeled, and repeated many times over before it becomes habit. All procedures and habits were once new to everyone, including veteran teachers. We often forget that it was all new to even the most accomplished teacher at one point.
As with pretty much everything in education, my first and most forceful words of advice are not to get discouraged. I honestly feel that I cannot and will not ever be able to emphasize this enough. We all, educator or student, are resistant to changes in our routines and ways of thinking, and adding another task, routine, idea, or procedure in any form to our practice can feel like a cumbersome and uphill battle. The coordinating and distributing of the physical supplies alone can become a major task and now we’re asking a teacher to add another layer to that? This unit does not take students actually outside of the building, but it does add an additional layer of content and more things to coordinate.
The intentional insertion of a new discipline is exciting but doing it with equity and doing the other subject justice, can often be trickier than we originally realize. As for an example with arts integration, for me it has always been the difference between adding a handout/coloring page to a lesson versus the actual integration of that other subject/discipline.
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