From Teaching Philosophy...
I believe that effective teaching practices connect the student with the text. Any activity that makes the characters and events in the work come alive for the students will better help them understand the literature in connection with themselves and the world. Effective teaching practices encourage student interaction with a text. This requires a highly democratic classroom where power is shared and students are given the freedom to experience the materials in ways that make sense to them. Since each student interacts and connects with a work of literature differently, which teaching practices are effective will differ for each student. Thus, I believe that differentiated instruction is a very effective method to engage the students in learning. In addition to differentiated instruction, practices that encourage student interaction with each other as well as the material, like cooperative learning and other small group activities, will also be very effective in aiding student learning.
Incorporating Interaction Into Lessons...
In the Poetry Unit, my students had ample opportunity to interact with
both the material and with each other.
In my first lesson on poetry, students were asked to interpret
the meaning of a portion of Billy Collins’ poem, “An Introduction to
Poetry,” by acting out their assigned part. When learning haiku,
students worked together in groups to complete a haiku by adding either
the middle line or the first and third lines (depending on which I gave
them). When studying the diamante, students brainstormed possible topics
and then chose one to write a collaborative diamante. Later, while
learning the quatrain and rhyme scheme, students worked together in
groups to figure out the rhyme scheme of different songs. Finally, at
the end of the Poetry Unit, students worked in groups to answer
questions as I read them aloud. Each group was required to provide an
answer, and any group that had the right answer received a point (thus,
it was not a competition among the groups).
Lessons that Relate to Interaction: