Karine Deschamps #260212684

6-12-2015
EDSL 350
Professor Jim Howden
Personal Approach to Classroom Practices

Moi jparle pas anglais, she said as she gestured with her hand to leave her
alone, as if I were mistaken. Mistaken for calling on her in class, mistaken for asking
her to participate simply because she was the French girl who did not speak English
and everyone knew it so why did I not get the memo to ignore her presence? It was
FE2 and I had even less experience or clout than I did during FE3, so I did not react
in a meaningful way. It just stayed with me. Why was it that she felt so
disempowered in a class that ironically was created for people just like her, that she
effectively erased herself from the room? She was not alone, sadly; there were
others. They had gotten the message from the school culture that English class was
for students who already spoke English! And my CT, with all her caring and decades
of experience, did not bat an eyelash! Why had this sweet and respectful 10 year
old given up?
This student was clearly not engaged, not motivated and not invested in
learning English. It isnt enough for a teacher to be a smiling face in the room,
textbook in arm. It isnt enough to care for them as people, though that is
important. The quality of the education a person gets is a huge factor that
determines the path along which they will walk through life. The job of a teacher
has immense consequences that play a key role in determining whether a person
goes into a concert hall to shoot as many innocent people as possible, or becomes a
kind pharmacist that gives back to her communitys little league team. The stakes
are huge and I am ready to take on the responsibilities of being a good teacher.
Patsy Lightbown (2015) so eloquently said in the plenary talk at SPEAQ that the
teaching of ESL is about time; since we dont get enough time inside the classroom
to provide the thousands of hours of input necessary to learn a language, we have
to give them the tools to continue their learning outside the classroom. My

classroom practices will center on providing a quality environment in which to learn,

and providing quality learning opportunities that will aim to motivate students to
continue their learning in their everyday lives. According to Glasser (in Charles,
2014), motivation is the single most important factor in learning. But what makes
a student motivated? The way I will conduct myself as a teacher, the way I set up
the classroom and the routines, and what I offer to students in terms of learning
situations will contribute to motivating the students to become life-long learners.
As educator Rita Pierson (2013) so eloquently said in her Ted Talk, kids dont
learn from people they dont like. According to Glasser (in Charles, 2013),
befriending students is a key factor in their learning. I believe that one of my first
responsibilities as a teacher is to get to know and like the students. I think that if I
appear to value their contribution to our classroom, they will be more inclined to do
their best. It should go without saying that I will read Individual Learning Plans and
learn about the students specific needs, but unfortunately I have met many
teachers who do not. During the first week of FE3 I created an All About Me fact
sheet that I had every single student fill out. It had spots to inform me of the
languages they speak and their current level and feeling towards English, as well as
practical academic information such as what they thought were their strongest
intelligences (Gardiner, 2013). Most importantly, it had them list their favourite
pastimes, their passions, and a spot to tell me anything they thought I should know
about them. For the first two weeks I made a point of going up to students to
connect with them on some of their passions. I know it made a difference because
those to whom I spoke were some of my keenest students. I met a talented portrait
artist, a vegan, a world-class water polo champion, a super fan of Korean pop music,
a gourmet cooking enthusiast, a talented makeup artist and a You Tube singing

sensation in my classroom and could never have guessed by their uniforms. I only
found out because I cared to ask. I will also let them know I care for them by
celebrating our collective good work by bringing small offerings of cookies or candy
from time to time, just because I like them and telling them so. Many of my McGill
professors have modeled this for us and I have enjoyed it immensely. If ever in the
future I have trouble liking a student, I will use a superb trick that I learned from the
guest speaker Megan Webster (2015) who came to class to talk to us about parentteacher communication; if you simply dont like a student and cant connect, ask
them to bring a picture of themselves as a baby! I am sure it works.
My favourite teachers are those who are 100% unapologetically themselves. I
am a singer and performer, so it feels good and natural for me to bring that into the
classroom. I sang and played guitar in class and had my students writing little songs
and doing mini performances in class and the response was excellent. My supervisor
complimented me for throwing in anecdotes from my own life or things that I had
read about in connection to the days lesson because he thought the kids were
further interested. During the comedy LES I shared that my father was a famous
comic and told a few stories about him and his peers throughout the series of
classes. By being who I am, I hope to inspire the students to be true to themselves
too; and I will tell them so. They will not all like me, but I hope they will appreciate
that I cared enough for them to bring my A game into the classroom.
In order to keep myself motivated and keep my own creative juices flowing, I
will be a reflective teacher. I will keep journaling because it is an effective way for
me to organize my thoughts and keep me honest. I will go to SPEAQ and get new
tools and make connections with other teachers who want to do their best as well. I
will create a critical friends group in the school so that I keep my standards high

because it is truly important to me to do the best I can, and I can see it would be
easy to get comfortable and blindly follow the textbook (Franzak, 2002) . I saw it all
around me in FE3. I will play my role as a responsible, caring and supportive teacher
that brings the energy and the passion necessary to capture the students attention.
The classroom routines I will set up will be highly dependent on the
environment or classroom climate in which I will be teaching; I may be a trolley
teacher or I may get my own classroom. Whatever the situation, the set-up has a
direct effect on ones mood. I saw a classroom that was in such disarray that I
wanted to leave immediately. The worst part was that it was a pre-DEP class in
which the students really needed to learn the skills of responsible and respectful
behaviour. In this FE, I discovered too late that even sec 4 and 5 PEI students do not
have the skills to keep their work neat and organized. I may or may not have much
say in the classroom layout, but I will have a say in how students get organized. I
will not accept piles of books and papers everywhere. I will ask the students to
purchase a binder with loose-leaf and a notebook, and will be meticulous and clear
with instructions on how to organize their notebooks and binders. If I have the luck
of having my own classroom, it will be invitingly decorated with a mix of cultural
posters and Desuggestopedia style can do motivational messages and
quotations because I myself love them. I would also like to have a board onto which
students could post things in which they are interested. The classroom will be
inviting and organized because it becomes a model for life and lowers anxiety.
The most basic and important classroom routine is putting up a menu on the
board for everything we will do together in the lesson. Checking off items as we go
along helps make the lesson dynamic because students see the progression. My
classroom routine also includes a news item at the beginning of class so that

students who wish to do so can share about anything they are excited about or have
been doing or learning outside of class. This is also something I picked up from a
McGill instructor and has been adopted by my CT as well. This may help to prevent
attention seekers to disrupt the activities at a later time. Other types of routines
may necessitate practice; effective transition or paper passing for example (Lemov,
2010). This would be especially beneficial for lower grades and for specific types of
activities such as learning stations. I also believe in Lemovs No Opt Out technique,
which simply means that all students are expected to participate at all times. I
frequently cold call on students to share, especially when they have worked on
something or have had time to think. In Ms Ks class, everyone works all the time. I
engage in dialogue with my students and question them a lot in order to build our
common knowledge together and I am careful not to turn the dialogue into a
predictable and boring monologue (Nystrand, 1997). Learning English is not a solo
activity, and we are all in this together.
With my classroom routines in place, literal and figurative, the next step is to
create a space where students feel like they have some power and some stakes. My
classroom will be as democratic as possible. I have not encountered much in terms
of management issues which has a lot to do with the environment in which I did my
FE3. There is a small chance that some of my efforts to meet students needs for
freedom and choice were effective. I agree with Glasser (in Martin, 2014) that all
behaviour is purposeful and that students will do what they think they have to do to
meet their basic needs for love and belonging, power, fun, freedom, security. My
main focus is prevention; give options and choices, give opportunities to work
together and to belong in the class, celebrate and have fun with mistakes (or
minimize where needed). In terms of choices, I will either provide choices for the

format of the work (paper, Power Point, presentation, etc) or the subject wherever
possible. For example, I gave my students the choice of 3 integrated tasks that were
provided at the end of the LES in their textbook, and gave them carte blanche for
the format as well. My CT and supervisor were both skeptical and warned me that it
would be too much work to correct a vast array of offerings. The work turned out to
be a pleasure to correct because most students had done their best, the variety was
entertaining, and I simply relied on a rubric which made my job easy. As long as the
instructions are clear, the grading rubric is made available to students, and the
goals are well explained, I think students will feel secure and they will feel that there
is justice in my classroom.
I will let the students help dream up an ideal learning situation. How would
they like the classroom climate to be? I will hold a brainstorming session in order to
come to a collective agreement and then have a contract which they can sign which
would be posted in the room. Language learning involves risk taking, and students
must feel comfortable making mistakes out loud without ridicule. They have to know
I am caring, fair, and have their backs. The only rule I will propose in the end is the
Golden Rule (Glasser in Martin, 2014). I will also have a suggestion box in a corner
always ready to receive feedback or suggestions from the students in an
anonymous way if they wish to do so. In the beginning of the year, spend time
working together to tease out the skills of active listening (Schindler, 2010) and
effective group work. Where problems occur, I will hold classroom meetings in order
to find solutions to our problems (Kagan in Charles, 2014). If it is only one or two
students who display problematic or disruptive behaviour, they will be met in
private in order to decide together how to proceed in order to rectify the situation. I
will take another tip from Megan Webster (2015) who suggests to strike when the

iron is cold; that is, to let the anger or hurt subside before attempting to resolve
conflicts or apply logical consequences.
The quality of the teaching and the positive environment will not work to their
full effect unless the learning situations are interesting and meaningful. Language
learning can occur through a myriad activities and subjects; there is no limit but my
own imagination. I will strike a good balance between providing opportunities to
come into contact with important cultural works, the so-called canon, and students
own pop culture. Since talking about staying relatively current with the culture of
teenagers in class, I have begun taking a few moments each day to browse through
internet news, clicking through what is trending on Facebook, and watching random
popular videos on You Tube. I believe in hooking the students with something
intriguing or flashy to which they can relate and then building our knowledge using
the three competencies in each class. Cooperative learning is important in any
language class because one must use a language in order to know it, and there is so
much to learn from others! Students at Des Sources knew they would get to work
together in each class, so they willingly engaged in any teacher-centered learning or
solo tasks that I put before them. I always put up functional language on the board
as well as new and useful vocabulary because it is simply central to my job as a
language teacher. I do not feel particularly comfortable creating tiered activities
with built-in levels, but that is my goal for the future. Until then, I always use the
differentiation suggestions in the teachers manuals because I find it important to
provide scaffolding for students who need it (transcripts of audio, graphic
organizers, simpler or more complex versions of a task, etc).
I believe in improvement as well, so I would like to provide opportunities to
improve their work and deepen their understanding (Glasser in Charles, 2014).

Portfolios are an excellent way to keep work organized, available at all times, and
ready to improve upon. I learned about portfolios from Philippa Parks (2014) at
McGill and was a bit skeptical, but I wished that I had them during my FE3. It not
only would have made my job at parent-teacher night easier, but I would have been
able to go over common mistakes and help students deepen their understanding of
grammar and syntax using their own words. I had lots of ideas that I could not
implement because we did not have access to students work. In the same vein, I
am committed to becoming an expert at giving useful and timely feedback. How
does one bridge the gap between where a student is and where he or she should be
(Hattie, 2012)? Portfolios will be a great tool for the students and me to judge their
progress, generate momentum and ideally some motivation too. Knowing where a
student should be at a given grade level is something that I need to work on.
In conclusion, the student to which I referred in the introduction was lacking
in one of the areas about which I spoke. It might have been that she felt the
material was beyond her capacity. It could be that she felt people would laugh at
her and that the teacher wouldnt be able to stop it. It could be that she felt she had
no power to steer the learning towards her own style, her needs or personal
objectives, or had any other avenues to let her frustration show beyond opting out.
It could be that she felt she had nothing to contribute to the class. I will never know,
but I would venture a guess that many things were wrong about her experience in
class, but highly fixable. During FE2 and 3 I witnessed pre-reform classes that
should not be happening in 2015. I have a veritable Everest worth of information to
learn about teaching, but I feel it is safe to say that students do not learn from filling
out activities in a workbook, MEESR approved as it may be. I also feel safe to say
that students learn English out in the world, and that all we can do as teachers is to

ignite and feed the flame, and to provide the support, context and scaffolding to
make sense of what they pick up. My teaching practice will be about passion,
connection, affect, transparency, democracy, choice, relationships, relevancy and
improvement. It will be about giving real tools, be they organizational, social,
strategic or simply grammatical, so that my students take their learning into their
own hands and hearts and go forth into the world and live a good life. Happiness is
the most important thing, and I truly believe that a great academic education is part
of a solid base on which to stand. I am thrilled and honoured to be able to play a
part in building that foundation.

Word Count: 3013 (excluding Reference and presentation page)

References
Charles, C.M. (2014). Building Classroom Discipline, (Eleventh Edition). New York:
Pearson.
Franzak. (2002). Developing a teacher identity: The impact of Critical Friends
Practice on the student teacher. English Education, 34(4), 258-258. Retrieved
December 6, 2015.
Gardiner, H. (2012, June 29). Multiple Intelligences. Retrieved December 6, 2015,
from http://howardgardner.com/multiple-intelligences/

Hattie, J. (2012). The Flow of the Lesson: The Place of Feedback. In Visible learning
for teachers: Maximizing impact on learning. London: Routledge.

Lemov, Doug. (2010). Teach like a Champion: 49 Techniques that put students on
the path to college. San Francisco: Wiley.

Lightbown, P. (2015, November 27). It's About Time. Lecture presented at

SPEAQ Annual Conference in Bonaventure Hotel, Montreal.

Nystrand, M. (1997). Opening dialogue: Understanding the dynamics of

language and learning in the English classroom. New York: Teachers College
Press.

Pierson, R. (2013, May 13). Every Kid Needs a Champion. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFnMTHhKdkw

Shindler, J. (2010). Effectively Managing the Cooperative Classroom. In

Transformative Classroom Management: Positive Strategies to Engage all Students
and Promote a Psychology of Success. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.