Miss Jill Kingsland's Portfolio

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Home > Standard 5

Standard 5

Learning Environment
The teacher uses an understanding of individual and group motivation and behavior to create a learning environment that encourages positive social interaction, active engagement in learning, and self-motivation.

Reflection

This audio clip provides a perfect glimpse into the classroom environment that I try to foster.  As you can hear, the students actively participate.  The fact that they were aware that they were being recorded almost made me think that they would be less confident and participate less in case they were wrong, but I was surprised to find that they were not affected by the pressure.  Anyway, they are comfortable with one another and are not intimidated by students who ask questions or answer questions, nor do they feel like they will be viewed by classmates as "uncool" if they participate.  

This did not occur in the audio clip, but whenever a student prefaces his or her comment by saying "this could be wrong, but" or "this is a stupid question," I always stop that student before the class and I tell him or her never to preface ideas negatively because then, we cannot help but believe that.  I tell my students to raise their hands and confidently give their answers or ask their questions.  I try my best to foster an environment in which students feel comfortable with sharing their ideas with me and with classmates.  

Evidence

Here is an audio recording (in wav format) of a few minutes of a lesson on rhetorical devices for improving structure in writing. I had my laptop hooked up to the projector, so the students were able to see the word documents we'd created in class the day before with the definitions of the terms and examples we'd created. We then analyzed a few paragraphs to see where these rhetorical devices were present. When I was doing the lesson, I had some technical troubles that I resolved, and my students were very patient and helped me out with continuing what we were doing. I eventually restarted the program so as to continue successfully. Many students participated enthusiastically and felt comfortable doing so (even though they knew they were being recorded).
File Attachments:
  1. jillrecording.wav jillrecording.wav
Author: Jill Kingsland
Last modified: 6/19/2005 1:23 PM (EDT)