Holding up a Mirror
Students do a lot of reflecting in self-paced Latin. It's a way for them to reflect on their strategies and skills. They reflect after each stage, and after every learning assessment. Those reflections are built in to the curriculum. There are also cyclical or weekly reflections.
For the 2nd Cycle, I choose a prompt for them to address, which was “How do your habits help or hinder your progress in Latin?” This is the prompt that they addressed in PM in the AM (Prep Men in the AM, a weekly morning program that students attend while faculty are engaged in meetings). My goal was to have students think about the reflection again, in terms of a specific item.
Most of the time, while students reflect, I am taking attendance or running around the classroom making sure that they are actually writing a reflection. This one, however, made me think. I found myself thinking of the the habits I have that help or hinder me as a teacher in a self-paced classroom. I couldn't let it go, and so here is the reflection I have.
Some of the habits that help me are the logistical: getting to school early to evaluate all the student work that has accumulated over night; making and maintaining to-do lists to keep me on track; working a little bit each day on onerous tasks like generating questions banks, updating Canvas (the LMS the Latin 1 program uses), etc. I feel that after 6 years as a teacher, I have reached almost maximum efficiency in the concrete tasks of the classroom.
The habits that have real impact on me as a self-paced teacher are my thought habits. I think one thought-habit that helps is my dedication to helping students become a better and stronger learner, my focus on each student's individual progress and struggles, and my interest in developing an individual relationship with each student.
My thought-habits that are detrimental to my performance as a self-paced teacher are grouped around the question of "what makes success?" I struggle to see success in a self-paced program as anything else but how far a student gets in the classroom.
This tempts me to check off an activity that isn't quite proficient just so the student can continue on and make progress that is easily measured.
This year, I'm working on changing my definition of success into one that sees success in terms of student growth, no matter how slowly that means the student moves. It will be frustrating to hold the student back and to continue to demand re-submissions, but hopefully cultivating this habit will help me, and the students, to stay true to the idea of mastery, and in-depth learning.