Mike Davis Elementary

I did observations at Mike Davis Elementary School, on the southeast side of Naples, FL. In doing these hours, I learned much about myself and the education process in general. I saw that teaching younger children is much like teaching the older ones; it’s the passion and connection with the children that counts. To paraphrase Jim Burke, the point of teaching is to get students to learn on their own (Burke, 2010). A five year old can develop that passion just as easily as a 15 year old if they have the right teacher.

When I asked Mysha if I could observe her classroom it was because I knew I would get a real life view of classroom activity. What I didn’t count on was learning so many things that I can apply to the grade level I wish to teach. Watching the way she interacts with her students and the passion that she has for not only language arts, but for teaching and education in general showed me what it takes to be a great educator. Mysha is the type of person who would be teaching whether or not she had a classroom. The biggest thing I learned from her was to do what you love…That, and to keep your sense of humor and patience.

Southwest Florida is highly diverse and Mike Davis Elementary is no different. Actually, the majority of the students are Hispanic. This can present a challenge in teaching, especially in relating to the students. When I asked Mysha about this, she said she finds that students learn more about reading and writing when she picks topics that are interesting to them, regardless of where they came from. For example, I observed one class that was assigned to read a story about Ann Frank, a typical lesson in a fourth grade classroom. Although the students read it and completed their work, it was obvious that they weren’t really interested in the subject matter; some had never even heard of Ann Frank. Mysha said that her goal of the assignment was more to teach about the parts of reading than to learn history.

I observed another class where she had the same goal of teaching the parts of a story, only this time she assigned a story about the movie Oz. When she gave the page number of the article the students were to read, there were cheers they were so excited. At the end of the lesson, the students had learned the same thing as those who read about Ann Frank, but they retained it more because of their interest. On top of that, they were more focused during the read and more detailed in their responses than those who read about Ann Frank. It didn’t matter what the ethnicity of the student was, if they were interested in the material, they learned it more fully.

Creating a curriculum that the students can relate to has proven to be a challenge for Mysha. We talked about the FCAT and how she is preparing her students for the upcoming exam. She said that she feels her students are capable of passing it as long as the reading portion is something that they can relate to. She said that in previous years the reading has been about things like snowmen and sledding. This proved to be a challenge for her students because most of them had lived in the subtropics their entire lives and had never seen snow. The fact that the children couldn’t put any context behind what they were reading threw a wrench in the cogs and the test scores suffered for it. Mysha said that her students were frustrated with the exam not because it is a challenge, but because they couldn’t relate to anything on it.

I hadn’t really thought about something that seems so obvious to me now – that learning is a lot about context. Michael Martinez says in his book, Learning and Cognition, that our schemas are all interconnected and that our learning gets a jump start from the schemas we have already made (Martinez, 2009). When a student has to learn something for the first time, they automatically reach for something they already know for context. The less context, the harder the material is to learn.

Think about it on a small scale. If you are introduced to a person whose name is from a foreign ethnicity and is something you’ve never heard before, chances are you’re going to have a harder time remembering it than if they shared a name with your best friend. It’s the same thing with learning. If you try to teach a student calculus before addition, their math schema will be too underdeveloped to comprehend the subject. But if you start small, connecting things as you go along, they’ll be channeling Rene Descartes before you know it.

Technologically speaking, Mysha uses both high and low tech options in her teaching. Mike Davis is a very low income school. If everything she taught was high tech, her students may not be able to take their work home for lack of proper resources. At the same time, if she kept everything low tech she would lose her students, who grew up with technology. Mysha does a good job with combining “traditional” forms of teaching with modern advancements. For example, part of each week is devoted to “packets”, which is a list of things that each student must complete by the end of the week. Each packet involves computer work as well as putting pen to paper. By incorporating both the old and new school, Mysha keeps her students interested while keeping things accessible to everyone.

I am very thankful to have been able to spend time in an experienced teacher's classroom and see how a passion for education can influence a student. I can only hope that one day a bright-eyed college kid may have the same experience in observing my (future) classroom.