Bunker’s empathetic, lighthearted, and fun nature motivates the children to want to learn. I appreciate her listening skills, as she is genuinely devoted to the students and well-meaningly corrects students in instructional discourse or about behavior. Moreover, Ms. Bunker’s care and concern for the interests of the students was emphatically apparent. This is evident as when students played activities like “rounding roll-up”, “rounding Yahtzee”, and diversified drawing activities to illustrate understanding of mathematical and literary concepts – they were extremely excited. Additionally, when she introduced the integrated art assignment in math and ELA, she acknowledged a couple of her students’ love for art and skill in drawing. Her references implied that she takes her students’ interests into consideration when planning for instructional activities – and this is an extremely valuable instructional technique.
Finally, though Ms. Bunker has a great general daily schedule – she may need to have a better plan for maximizing instruction on non-traditional days. During my field experience, there were many multi-cultural assemblies like Diwali and United Nations Day. Ms. Bunker would just allow the students to engage in whatever activities they wanted (educational or non-educational) – instead having additional material planned for idle …show more content…
To illustrate, especially during our discussion about water inequality – I was inspired to consider how students’ diverse worldviews influence their interpretations of classroom subject matter. Contributing to and witnessing such a controversial conversation in a sphere where extremely privileged children were engaged called me to be hyper-aware of the students’ cultural backgrounds; to consider my own cultural lens and biases; to consider the implications of many other (of the students’) cultural lens and biases. Moreover, as a student teacher at AIS I was able to gain a first hand experience in interacting with Piaget’s basic assumption of children’s cognitive development that, “children are active and motivated learners” (Ormrod, 2017, 29). Furthermore, his idea that students in fourth grade are in the concrete operational stage – which means that they can classify objects into different categories, understand the principle of conservation, and distinguish the differences between their own and other people’s perspectives – was definitely apparent in our conversations; as their very adult-like thought processing and logical reasoning behind the choices that they made so much sense that I often found myself laughing and thinking “These students are so wise. How do they even know this?” In other