As well as hosting three rounds of my own, I had the privilege of attending several rounds hosted by other M.A.T.’s at several Worcester Public Schools throughout the year. These opportunities to observe my colleagues and their students exposed me to different grade levels and disciplines, and deepened my understanding of my own classrooms.

A Glimpse into a Second Grade Classroom

In November, I ventured into the realm of elementary education to attend fellow M.A.T. Cate Huynen’s round in her second grade classroom at Jacob Hiatt Magnet School. It was my first extended visit to an elementary school in Worcester, and I was excited to be around younger children for a change. Cate’s round focused on visualization while reading. Her students had just learned to formally make text-to-self connections, and they were now working on using visualization to help them better comprehend texts. Although there were six grades separating Cate’s students and my students, I saw similar structures at play in her classroom. She had her students do think-pair-shares multiple times throughout the lesson as they visualized different scenes from the book she read aloud, and then asked pairs to share their discussions with the class. I, too, used this strategy with my eighth graders in my math classes. Cate said that her students have been practicing think-pair-shares recently, and their overall willingness to participate was evident. I appreciated that the second graders didn’t try to hide their enthusiasm; I’m used to eighth graders somewhat concealing their excitement about academics! 

During the pre-round, Cate expressed that she wanted students to use evidence from the text to inform their visualizations. When we work with word problems in my math classes, I always push my students to justify their mathematical thinking by using evidence from the text. This important action is fundamental to all disciplines, and it was awesome to see it happening at such a young age. The visualization aspect of the round also made me reflect on the role of imagination in math. My students worked on a variety of creative projects in which I  encouraged them to be imaginative, but I needed to explicitly give them permission to use their imaginations since they weren’t used to doing that. In second grade, it seems that the opposite is true. I wondered how I could make my classroom a space in which students could use their imaginations and realize that imagination is still a powerful tool for learning in secondary school.

Climbing the Stairs to Tenth Grade

At Claremont, the middle school lies on the ground floor of the building while the high school occupies the two upper floors. Despite being in the same building, a surprisingly little amount of interaction between the middle and high school grades transpires. Although I knew I should take advantage of the opportunity to explore other classrooms, I spent most of my year caught up on the first floor of the building with my eighth grade students. One of my forays to the upstairs of Claremont was to attend a round hosted by Kim Reeser, a secondary English M.A.T. working in a tenth grade classroom. 

Kim’s round allowed me to listen with her students to an audiobook of the first chapter of To Kill A Mockingbird. In my tenth grade English class, we read To Kill A Mockingbird and I loved it. I remember eagerly deciphering Scout’s narration in an attempt to figure out more about the mysterious Boo Radley and soak up all of Atticus’ wise remarks. In the pre-round, Kim told us that many of her students were already struggling with the novel. Her class contained ten low-level English language leaners, for which the outdated Southern vocabulary was proving difficult. Even her other students found comprehending the vocabulary, along with the accompanying historical context, challenging. This made me think about the different cultural capital that I possessed as a tenth grade student as compared to the students in Kim’s class. I grew up in an affluent white suburb in the United States, learning the history of mostly white Americans in my prestigious public school. By the time I started reading To Kill A Mockingbird in school, I understood allusions to Southern customs and history and was familiar with certain Southern phrases and vocabulary from movies I had seen or books I had read. I’m guessing that many of the students in Kim’s class didn’t have that same amount of cultural capital going into To Kill A Mockingbird as I did, but the curriculum mandates that they read a book that someone like me shares much more in common with than them.

This made me question the extent to which I am making my math curriculum draw upon my students’ cultural capital. Am I doing enough to make the curriculum culturally relevant? How I am I using my students’ funds of knowledge to promote mathematical understanding and application? Do I even know the extent of my students’ funds of knowledge? Kim’s round brought up those questions for me, all of which I continued to reflect upon and explore for the rest of the year.

Exploring Poetry and Language with Fourth Graders

In the spring, I had the pleasure of attending the round of Marie Deininger, another elementary M.A.T., in her fourth grade classroom at Woodland, the elementary school attached to Claremont. During the round, her students worked to define and understand the terms verse, stanza, line break, and rhyme. The thing about this round that really blew me away was Marie’s choice to include poems in languages other than English. Throughout the lesson, she showed her students poems in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and German, all of which are languages spoken by either her or her students. During the pre-round, she pointed out that students do not need to understand a poem to identify those structural elements, which was a powerful insight that I had never considered.

After first having her students read and analyze the structures of English poems, Marie transitioned to a Spanish poem. Many of her students were visibly and audibly excited when they realized the poem was in Spanish. When none of her students volunteered to read the poem aloud, Marie read it for them. She was upfront with her students about not knowing how to pronounce all the words in the poem, but by reading the poem anyway, she showed her students an amazing model of positive risk-taking. I tried to model the same linguistic risk-taking with my own students through speaking Spanish in my classroom. I asked for their help with words I didn’t know and I openly made mistakes and tried to correct them. I hoped, as I think Marie did too, that this would give students the confidence to take those same risks with English.

Another really rich moment in Marie’s round was when she showed the class a poem in Vietnamese. Instead of asking a student to read this poem, she played her students a recording of a woman reading the poem. Many students did not know what to make of the recording at first, for it almost sounded like a song and the phonetics were completely different than those of English and Spanish. A few students laughed. Marie stopped the recording part of the way through to address the noises coming from the class, specifically the laughs. She acknowledged that the language might sound different and new for some students, but firmly told her students that there was absolutely nothing to laugh about and that she expected them to listen respectfully. When she started the recording over, one student laughed again halfway through. She told him he was no longer welcome in the class and her mentor teacher took the student outside with some sort of behavior reflection.

I was really impressed by Marie’s setting of high expectations for her students and holding them to it. In this particular circumstance, I thought that she effectively communicated to her students an important lesson about cultural and linguistic tolerance, which we desperately need in this day and age. By doing that, she also established the classroom as a safe environment for her students, most of whom spoke a language other than English. Even if that student was just laughing because he didn’t know exactly how to respond, which I think often is the case for inappropriate laughter, I think it was still important that she showed her students that she will not stand for anything that can be interpreted as intolerance.

This made me reflect on the culture in my integrated math class, for I often heard my students disrespecting each other and me and did not always know how to appropriately respond. Earlier in the year, I found myself ignoring disrespectful comments (mostly those aimed towards myself) in an effort to show the offending student that I couldn’t be bothered by their words and that their pettiness was not worth the attention they were seeking. Through a conversation with my mentor teacher, I realized that my repeated silence in those situations communicated to my students that they could say things like that to each other and to me, which was not okay. For the rest of the year, I worked to find ways to better address that sort of disrespect and to show my students that those comments were not welcome in our class, like Marie had done.