Teachers Negotiating Different Communities

The vignette portraying the difficulties encountered by the first year teacher in Louisiana really stuck with me while reading this chapter. She was highly educated on successful ways of teaching science and really believed that she was going to be a highly effective science teacher, as all of us hope to be as well. Once she began teaching, she realized that her students were not receptive to the inquiry style of teaching that she believed in. She debated teaching out of old textbooks and lecturing to her students, but decided that figuring out why her method wasn't working would be more beneficial. I think that this a very important quality for beginning teachers to have. This teacher spoke to her students about their learning histories and observed other classrooms to get acquainted with the typical teaching strategies used in this area and was able to adjust her teaching to fit both her needs and the needs of her students. This shows the importance of novice teachers learning about the backgrounds of their students and taking these into consideration while teaching.

One example of this that I encountered was in East Hartford while they were implementing reading and writing workshop. This is a different style of teaching that many students were not accustomed to. Students are offered choices in the books they select and have plenty of time to read freely around the classroom. In order to make this work, teachers had to spend weeks at the beginning of the school year getting children acquainted with this literacy set-up through rules, modeling, reminders and reasons for this way of learning. Similar strategies can be used in science. If students are not used to the inquiry method, it may be helpful to model how it looks, give reasons as to why this type of learning is being used in the classroom and ease students into it.

Reading this teacher's experience really made me see the value in learning about my students' learning backgrounds and thinking of strategies to combine my beliefs and teaching strategies with the strategies they're comfortable with.