Week 4/5 Reflection

The last two weeks of observation at BHL took place during the Milestones Testing. Apparently, this year the scores don't count, but the 7th graders are not aware of this. They had heard rumors from the 8th graders about scores not counting, but the teachers did a good job of discounting these rumors to help the students put forth the effort necessary to excel at the tests. Tests were held on Tuesday and Thursday over two weeks. The first week involved the ELA tests. The first portion was multiple choice and the second portion was writing. After taking the ethics tests for our pre-certificate training, I was intrigued to see how the teachers work with students in between test days without giving any specifics of the test away. The biggest thing I took away was that it's okay to spend the day before the writing portion working on writing; telling the students the specific type of essay they would write and going over similar prompts is when the ethics line would be crossed. With everything that is going on in Atlanta schools, I think it's good that Georgia is beginning to take precautions to ensure something similar does not happen in the future. Back to BHL, I noticed that during the ELA week, the students had no interest in being in English class. They had just spent 4 hours on English the day before, so who can really blame them that they don't want to talk about literary elements and writing on the day in between. The teacher had the students edit a peer's paper (the student was anonymous). The students were not engaged in this activity at all. Perhaps instead of giving them a cut and dry assignment, the teacher should have come up with a game or some sort of "out of the ordinary" activity so that the work would feel less like English class or be remnant of the Milestones test they had labored over the day before. The next week was Science and Math testing and it was clear that the students were way less reluctant to attend English class this week. The new challenge is that now that they have taken the end of course test, what is the motivation to do the work? The teacher and I had a brief conversation about how he was going to have a little more liberty in planning the last month of class, which is good since it would take a lot of creativity to motivate the students. Overall, BHL was an incredible experience. The students are so bright, and it really is a beacon of light in the Athens community. I was happy to finally be able to apply some of the pedagogical strategies I learned all last semester. You don't know until you try a strategy, and BHL was the ideal environment for working with young writers and students.