Author: jmferguson3

1. I didn’t really observe specific strategies for opening and closing the lesson. The classroom was exceptionally well-behaved and didn’t really need to be herded into anything. The transition from work time to the lesson was seemingly very well-established and ingrained into the routine. I did notice that during the lesson the teacher had the students filling in their notes on pre-made sheets made to go along with the lesson on the smartboard. This ensured that the students could follow along easily and the teacher could cover a wider range of material.

2. Again, I didn’t really see any active implementation of “strategy’ – the management of the classroom was largely accomplished by the strong establishment of an existing routine that everyone knew to follow. From the ringing of the bell to study time, study time to lecture time, and lecture time to the end of class, students took to the orderly transitions as a given. Mostly I would just say the teacher managed her time well to be able to cover the material in the time allotted.

3. The closed notes sheets she used seemed really helpful, if a little time consuming to prepare. I don’t typically do a whole lot of lectures, being an art teacher, but I have found that my lectures are a lot more focused when I have something like that for everyone to follow along with.

https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/teacher-student-relationship

– This is a quick video about a teacher named Brian Van Dyck, who talks a little bit about his strategy for relating to students by focusing on one positive element of their personality that interests him. By letting them know that this trait interests him and encouraging them to emphasize it, supposedly it discourages more negative behaviors.

https://blog.panoramaed.com/teacher-student-relationship-study/

– This is an entry on the Panorama Education Blog about a study regarding common interests between teachers and students. In several groups, the teacher and students were given surveys about their hobbies and goals and varying degrees of the commonalities between both parties were shared with each group: In one, the students knew what they had in common with the teacher and the teacher did not, the next group was the reverse, then both, then neither. Unsurprisingly, both of them knowing they had common ground helped, although it seems in the case where only the teacher knew, it resulting in certain students maybe scoring higher, which is a little sketchy.

https://www.apa.org/education/k12/relationships.aspx

– A page on the American Psychological Association about positive teacher-student relationships. The information is divided into several tabs that tackle one aspect at a time. There’s a rather interesting one about halfway through devoted to “Theoretical perspectives to explain student behavior’ – about different theories on what motivates certain students to behave in certain ways and how they perceive teachers and their peers.

Very enlightening article. Kind of wish I didn’t read it in case I end up teaching in a rural community after I get my initial license. I certainly don’t want to feel like I’m helping to perpetuate a practice of forcing natives to supplicate themselves before the white people who’ve taken it upon themselves to help them.  I can totally believe Dr. Alberts’ assertions that social service programs intended to help Natives might have adverse effects such  on their autonomy – it actually kind of reminds me of a Kenyan economist named James Shikwati who has spoken out against foreign aid to combat poverty in Africa on the grounds that it actually destroys their farming economy by making it impossible for local farmers to compete. White people can’t solve everything!

Hopefully the changes  planned for the Alaska Native’s education system can accommodate all these non-Natives whose careers depend on the current system staying the way it is, because otherwise I feel like it’d be hard to make those changes. People are going to fight for those jobs. Cutting them out of the loop completely might make it hard for them to empathize with the Natives’ situation and support their goals, and that’s if all of these Alaska Native organizations actually  can get politicians to go along with eliminating an entire industry in the first place.