Middle School Week One Reflection

My first week in middle school was amazing! I spent four days with three sixth grade classes.  As I walked to my car on Friday I was immediately looking forward to Monday morning. I was surprised by my time spent in the classroom in that I didn’t expect to enjoy middle school so much. I knew I would enjoy being in a classroom, but I knew that I was a high school girl so what exactly would middle school have to offer me? The answer is a new teaching desire. I LOVED middle school!! These kids were engaged, excited to learn, they were active participators, and they needed their voices to be heard. A large majority of the class did not sink into their seats when the teacher asked them a question—instead excited hands shot up with hopes that it would be their turn to share their thoughts and opinions. These kids were amazing, truly!!

The classes were being taught a lesson on the Greensboro Four, which would finish with a Socratic seminar. The lesson was taught across four classes and began with the students reading an article, followed by watching a short PBS film. The students were being taught to close read the text with highlighting and underlining important facts, circling vocab, and writing in the margins. The students worked through the text together as a class and then broke into two groups to develop ten higher level thinking questions based on Costa’s levels of questioning, which would fuel their Socratic seminar. These students were excited and they had awesome questions. It was exciting to see children actively engaged! From a teacher candidate standpoint, it was also cool to see how the teacher differentiated this lesson among classes. One class was given a slightly different article, and was required to come up with nine questions made up of three level one, three level two, and three level three questions.

Seeing the amount and types of writing these kids did was refreshing. They had awesome writing assignments that I wanted to do: writer’s notebooks, senses poems on the civil rights movements, and six panel comics! I read a lot of their poems and they were amazing writers. Most importantly, they ENJOYED writing. I am so excited for what the next three weeks will bring into my teaching arsenal and into my writerly soul.