Where There's a Will, There's a Way

During a very important course called "classroom management", I learned that persistence is one of the important characteristics to achieve success in classrooms. What you expect is what you get. I never actually understood the true meaning of this sentence until I had the experience myself. As I learned, varying your teaching methods increases students' competency in a language. Differentiated instruction should be implemented to adhere to different learning styles. Being aware of these points is essential for helping students reach higher levels of proficiency. However, without persistence, all your hard work will go in vain. If you have all the prepared material, but show no perseverance in your work, students will not take the task seriously. However, if they are constantly motivated and their work is being followed up, you will achieve the results expected. 

A teacher should be really confident in what she is doing. Let me tell you about my own experience. For one of the reading lessons, I decided to have it carried out differently. I applied a strategy called Literature Circles which is a form of differentiated instruction. This strategy has students deal with the lesson creatively. Various roles are appointed to students. For example, the illustrator is responsible for creating a picture that represents something about the story. The word explorer must explain the difficult and important words. The discussion manager asks questions about the story and the connector relates the story to his personal life or experiences. And there are more roles that can be implemented. When I first introduced this strategy to my students, they started following traditional ways to get the work done; a simple explanation of the words, and simple drawings and lecturing. As I moved around the class during group work, I gave students some ideas of how creative they could be with presenting the material and I did not do this only once. For the following three days, I kept an eye on students' progress and day after day I noticed how motivated they had become. I even got more excited to see how well the work was going. However, I did not expect the results to be as good as they were. The day of the presentations, I had students who made booklets to explain vocabulary, while others got visual aids and some gave context clues to explain the words. Other students made models that reflected the events of the story. The discussion manager asked questions that require deep thinking and were well thought out. They were similar to the questions I ask myself. That day I could actually call my students "teachers". The activity was amazing and rewarding. Students loved this activity and so did I. 

                      Persistence is the key. Be persistent to get what you expect. 

This model, which was designed by one of my students, represents the setting in the story. It's the "Catskill Mountain." As you can see, in the middle there's a river and on both sides there are mountains.