For the past few months, I have had the opportunity to participate in the Village Project we have here at SNC that provides Education students to go out into the field and community to work with area schools in helping out in after school programs. For this, I was an ELA tutor for a second grade student at one of the local Catholic schools. We just finished our placements and it was such a great opportunity. With this experience, I learned so much that I will take with me and remember for the rest of my life. Here are 10 things that I took away from this incredible experience that I will take with me into the educational field:
Rapport– Building a trusting relationship with your student/s early on is so beneficial in the long run. Making an attempt to show that you care about them and want them to succeed really helps the student’s motivation and their overall experience with you! The first day that I met my student, we filled out and colored an “All About Me” sheet that provided me with some basic information about him so I would be able to tailor my lessons to him and his interests or talk about things he enjoyed during our introduction time together. From then on, we worked very well together and the lessons went so well.
Process Praise– I had never heard of this until we started training to become a tutor, but this is such an important tool that I learned that allows the student to really see their success. When a student is successful at something, instead of saying “I’m so proud of you for doing ____”, you respond with “ The way you did ____ was cool! How did you do ____?” I found that it really helped my student to further succeed in areas when he knew what he was doing was helping him, and not just making me proud. The change in wording makes a world of difference.
Ask for guidance when you need it – This is something that I really took advantage of during this process. Asking other educators for help is something that never gets old and hearing what they have to say is a great resource for new teachers. My tutor coach and I had a shared document where I shared what went well during lessons and she replied back with comments relating to that. If I had questions, she gave me suggestions and answers that guided me towards changing things up or adding things into my lessons to further increase the learning that was happening during tutoring.
Understanding differences in students – Being in a school with a different background really opened my eyes to the diversity of students, which is something that I had never really seen before in schools I have been in or a part of. The different cultures and backgrounds shouldn’t, however, be seen as a negative thing, but a learning experience. My student was Hispanic, and he taught me words in Spanish and about different things he does in his family, which opened my eyes to cultural differences that I hadn’t previously been exposed to. This provided me with an experience that I will be able to take on with me, not only in the classroom, but also in other life experiences!
It’s okay to not finish a lesson– Don’t rush what you don’t have to. If your student/s aren’t getting it the first time, don’t feel the need to move on because there is a timed schedule. It is important that students understand basic concepts and ideas. If they don’t get it the first time, try again and adapt the lesson so it isn’t the same the next time. There were times where my student needed a little more help on the lesson, so instead of moving on, we stopped the progress and I adapted the lesson so that they might be better able to understand a different way I taught them.
BRAIN BREAKS! – Sometimes students need a little break. For my student, they were coming right after school and after a long day, sometimes the motivation was a little low. If I noticed a difference in attention from the beginning to the middle, I would get up and change the scenery and talk about something he is interested in for a few minutes. This allowed them to take a break from learning and refocus on something else for a bit so that the attention might be a little higher. Use this with caution, however, as derailing attention might be too much of a distraction and cause you to get off track.
Take what you have learned and apply it to the future – This is something huge that I learned throughout this experience. There were so many things that happened this year that really made me understand different situations that might occur as a teacher, so I will take all of these experiences into consideration when in my own classroom so I can help my future students succeed!
Lesson Plans aren’t cookie cutters – For tutoring, I had a lesson plan and I can say from experience that you definitely should consider spicing up the lesson plans. The lesson plans we were provided had a good basic plan for what we should be teaching, and the rest was up to us. Having the freedom to change it up so it was engaging for our students was a great thing to have. It kept them engaged and ready to learn, rather than just spitting out ELA knowledge that we were teaching them. Everyone can teach differently and this is great for learning, especially since we know that not all students learn the same. Changing the lesson plan to cater to your student’s learning style is HUGE!
You CAN do this! – There were a few times during this experience where I questioned whether this was really what I was called to do. However, with the guidance of my coaches and deeper evaluation of what I was doing, I realized that I CAN do this and it is what I was called to do. Even when things get tough, you can stop and take some deep breaths and think about what you are doing. The thing that really helped me was remembering all of the students that I am going to be teaching in the future and how I am planting seeds for them to grow. There was a drawing I saw on social media that made me think of this and I will forever remember that that is what I am called to do.
Students really do appreciate what you do for them – On the last day of tutoring, my student made me a card that, when they gave it to me, I started tearing up. They wrote that they appreciated me helping them with reading. For VP, we also filled out a form at the end of the week that asked the student what we did this week to help them learn and my student said that they really appreciated how I helped them to succeed in learning how to read big words and how I was always there for them to help them get better at what they were doing. This showed me the impact and importance of my job as their tutor and seeing how they were also seeing how I was helping them to succeed at ELA was eye opening.
This was a very eye opening experience for me because I learned so much about teaching and I am very grateful for this experience. This is such a great opportunity for SNC Education students and I feel that this will help build skills for so many future educators to come.
