SED 564

      Even more so, as I have read from Johnson in other classes, we need to have these dialogues with our students to first address and recognize the prevalence of race within not only the school but in society. Having these open dialogues allows us to "confront the negative consequences of racism in our school environments and serve to enhance our own growth just as it does our students," (Nakkula 125). In order for these dialogues to happen, we need to recognize that we cannot fully "overcome our prejudices, but we can recognize them with practice and learn to modify and respond to them constructively," (Nakkula 126). Meaning that we need to identify and embrace who we are and who are students are so that we can grow together and promote working relationships within the classroom. The chapters in Nakkula this week play an incredibly prevalent role in my everyday interaction with students. In fact just today, I had a student say that I was being "r

After reading chapters 4&5 in Nakkula, I really took a lot of time to reflect on myself as a teacher and mentor for my students.  In the readings, what really stuck out to me was in chapter 4 on page 74 talking about the developmental assets framework.  More specifically, the external assets of "Support, Empowerment, Boundaries and Expectations, and Constructive Use of Time," (74). Reading through each of these clusters that are essential to nurturing healthy youth development, I thought about how I relay these assets(if at all) within the classroom with my students.  Continuing through the reading, I feel like while there is a lot of different theories, concepts and ideas they all come back to the same general idea of getting to know your students and creating relationships with them.  For example, the situation with Lorena and Steve, Mr. Harrison had a positive relationship with his students and knew what these students were capable of so the situation was able to be re

Nakkula also says that “no one is a solo author,” (Nakkula 6) when it comes to creating our life narratives. He also goes on to say how the students we work with are “co-writing’ our narratives just as we are cowriting theirs,” (pg. 7). This statement resonated with me because the students we work with everyday play such a huge role in our lives and sometimes we don’t realize how much they shape how our lives and how we live. This cowriting also reminded me of a TedTalk about the dangers of a ' single story ' and how we can learn from understanding the story of so many different people and perspectives. However, this also means that our connections and relationships with our students also affects how we experience ourselves as teachers. On page 13 Nakkula speaks to how teachers depend on affirmation from their students and how teachers can feel hurt to have student resistance after much work. This resonated with me a lot because I have had times where I plan a ‘perfect’ lesson

I want to start this post by saying I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about reading a graphic novel textbook, however, I was pleasantly surprised.  Ayers did very well in portraying his point with both words and pictures and was able to keep me engaged throughout. While there are many points that Ayers talks about that I strongly agree with, there were a few moments that stuck out to me while reading.  The first of which is how students are labeled in classrooms. Being a math teacher, I am constantly looking at student data and creating ways to move students out of ‘intervention’ levels based on some high-stakes test that tells me nothing about the student taking the test.  These labels “lower our sights, misdirects our vision, suppresses possibility,” (Ayers 18) while also potentially affecting the students view of themselves as Ayers showed with the boy's change of his self-portrait after he got a note sent home (Ayers 30). On page 20, Ayers says “focusing on what I can’t

For as long as I can remember, my parents always provided me with whatever I needed. While my parents didn’t come from money, they both worked incredibly hard to provide me and my siblings a better life than what they had. That being said, my parents did not graduate from college but they always supported us in school and set the expectation for us to go to college. Even today, my parents still push for me to continue my education and to be the best that I can be within my content. While in college, I switched my major many times and honestly never thought I would be a teacher. I had taken a few classes in different majors and never really found one I enjoyed until my first education class. The professor had engaging activities and really allowed me to see what being a teacher would be like, and once I got a taste of it, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. Once I knew I what I wanted, I had to decide on an age group I wanted to teach. I thought about my academic experiences and imm