Blog Entry #2

Discuss an effective or ineffective ELA learning context or situation that you remember from your own years as a student. In particular, discuss how the teacher engaged/disengaged you as a language learner through her/his text selection, the associated activities, and how this challenged or built upon your previous skills/knowledge/attitudes. Complete your entry by explaining how you would characterize this teacher’s instructional approach.

In grade four, I switched schools halfway through the school year. I went from an interesting and dynamic French immersion classroom to a boring and frustrating English one. I was much happier to be learning in English rather than French, but my new teacher, Mrs. B, was incredibly dull and old fashioned. While she was an all-around terrible teacher, she was particularly bad at teaching language arts.

I left my old class in the middle of a very engaging unit about poetry. When I arrived in Mrs. B’s classroom, the class was learning cursive handwriting. It would have been alright if she had us writing stories or reports or even just sentences, but instead she had us writing out the alphabet in handwriting over and over again and then handing in our papers to be marked, for the whole rest of the year. Mrs. B. practiced a transmissive instructional approach; she would stand at the front of the classroom at the blackboard and write the same letters over and over again, expecting us to do the same on our papers. I had already developed decent cursive writing at my old school in grade three, so the lessons were particularly boring for me. The worst part is that we literally did not do any other language arts lessons besides handwriting from February until June. We didn’t read any novels or do any creative writing or research projects. Maybe the class had lessons in other areas before I arrived, but regardless of that, I think that five months is too long to focus on cursive handwriting and nothing else. The contrast between my old language arts class and my new one was dramatic.

Mrs. B’s assessment style was summative; she would not walk around and engage with students individually. Rather, she would simply have us hand in our papers with the alphabet and she would mark them each night. She also avoided the social aspect of learning language and did not allow us to engage with each other, ignoring the fact that “learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it is immersed in cultural and social settings,” (Vygotsky). We were always seated in rows facing the blackboard and she spent the whole day standing in front and talking at us rather than with us, not only for language arts but also in the other subjects.

Mrs. B’s transmissive instructional style, summative assessment, and single-strand lessons did not engage me as a learner. I was not supported and scaffolded within my zone of proximal development (Vygotsky), but rather I was left with lessons that were too easy and not engaging. She did not build on my schema (Piaget) of language arts or include new material to motivate the class to learn. Finally, she did not balance her lessons to include cognitive or affective stimulation, but rather she focused solely on the psychomotor aspect of learning cursive handwriting. Mrs. B. was older and had obviously not made any effort to keep her teaching up-to-date and current, which is a mistake that I plan not to make as a teacher.