My Problem With Standards: Implementing Group Work in the Non-Traditional Enlish Classroom :: Learning Teaching Essays

My Problem With Standards Implementing Group Work in the Non-Traditional Enlish ClassroomThis experience open my eyes. I learned a lot, and my ideas and ideals spend a penny changed since I completed the frontmost part of this project. As a student teacher in a vocational program, academics were not the priority of these studentstheir specialties and there outside jobs were. At first, I found this challenging in a negative way but gradually, I truism possibilities.The biggest challenge that I saw as far as my inquiry project went lay in how I would implement all of the research that I had done on how great group work is all around. Mainly this was due to the fact that I approached this topic with a very idealistic, wide-ranging view.The first part of this project was very much a head knowledge/research approved paper. As I read over it now, I could not possibly have had a lot of hard ideas on how I could actually implement itand even if I did, I doubt that would have profited me . As I entered my class eight weeks ago, I had all of those wonderful ideals of collaborative learning before meit is what I wanted to see. But, as my grandmother always told me when I was little (and occasionally now), I want doesnt get. I see now that if all of my ideals had come easily to me in this experience, I wouldnt have learned a thing, and I definitely wouldnt have learned how to deal with the personality types and the needs of the students that I had.The class itself was within a non-hostile surroundings for the most part. The students were used to having too much autonomy, and thus my research statistic of 70-90% teacher talk in most classrooms was put out of touch. The problem consisted in not only the students having control of the class, but the fact that they had plenty of oral language abilities, and there was no need for me to try and develop them. These seniors had been working on one assignment since the beginning of the twelvemonth, and they were tired of look ing at it. Having said that, 80% of the students only had three, pencil corrected pages to show for a years worth of work. All of them were not responsive to correction. After my four weeks of observation, I was doubtful that these kids would do any learning, much less group learning, at all.