Beginnings

A busy morning, with lots of new families arriving and many regulars registering late–but all was quiet in the Patterson Gallery by 9:15. As I walked around the classrooms, I was impressed by the extent to which everything seemed to be completely under control, calm, productive, and focused:  A tribute to all of the careful preparation the student teachers had done over the past few weeks.  It was one of the smoothest first mornings we have had!

It went by quickly!  Trying to spend some time in each of the seven classrooms, I caught only glimpses of what was going on there:  Enough to see that the 10-year-olds were deeply engaged in the conversation about myths, fairytales and folklore; that the preschool and kindergarten kids were excited to watch the video clips taken from inside a space ship (and to think that they will enjoy seeing those again and again as the semester progresses); that the 6 and 7 year olds had intriguing stories to tell about all of the (varied!) Model Magic sculptures they had made; that the 9 year olds made some amazing monsters on their T-shirts and then as exquisite corpse; that the single sex 8-year-old group was fascinated by the concept of self-portraiture; that the 11 to 13s were completely absorbed in completing their entrance requirements to the BiFocal Detective Agency; and that the high school group was seriously considering the possibilities of performance art.  

In every classroom, there were different kinds of performance happening, and different kinds of listening, different ways of negotiating the balance between what teachers had planned and what students wanted to know or to share or to learn.  I am curious about how each teaching team felt this Saturday about the balance between teacher-direction and student-responses in your own classroom.  Did you wish you had done or said or demonstrated more?  Did you feel the students needed more space for their own explorations and inquiries?  Did the class move too fast or too slow?  

And a second question: What do you wish you had captured last Saturday to indicate what your students learned?

With apologies to the three classes not represented here (I'll catch up with you next time!), here are some images from the day.