Teaching Students

During my time teaching Kindergarten, I realized that the students are never asked if they have any questions before they are expected to apply what they were just taught. Regularly, when a teacher is leading a lesson, the teacher asks students questions, and students are expected to answer. There was “one study [that] found that teachers asked…50.6 questions per half hour compared to 1.8 student questions per half hour,” which does not teach students how critical their questioning of the authority figure really is and the value and courage in doing so holds (Minigan et al., 2017, p. 269). Because of this traditional format of question-asking in the classroom, there is little to no space for students to voice their questions. It is a practice so normalized that at first glance, no one finds an issue when a lesson is structured in this way: the teacher

predominantly questioning the students. When I look back on my early videos of teaching, I did a lot of the talking - arguably too much at times. There were many lost opportunities for students to teach me and each other that I trampled over in my teaching because of my misconceptions about how a classroom runs, who should be driving the conversation, and when. This video clip is from my summer placement, the first time I taught a mini-lesson. As you can see and hear, students begin engaging with the text and conversing with the group. They asked meaningful questions: Are they sharing from the same cone? What about germs? Is the ice cream free, or did he have to pay for it? Meanwhile, I was too worried about getting through the whole book in my allotted lesson time that I cut their

conversation short. I answered one question about the cost of the ice cream but continued reading as opposed to engaging in conversation. They were teaching me what they believed it would take to share ice cream with another person, but I didn’t follow up to ask why. As you watch, you can see I try to get back to reading and posing the questions I had pre-planned even faster. Students asking questions was not part of my lesson plan, so when their engagement and questions began to build further than I had originally expected, I quickly retreated back to the rhythm of reading, asking questions, and students quickly answering. If a teacher’s goal is to uphold the traditional standards of teaching while leading lessons, student voices must grow quiet so that the focal voice and questions are predominantly coming from the teacher.  However, if a teacher is to open the space for questions, student voices will ring true and loud. 

work, linked to the right, I detail what is happening in my ideal classroom: how students interact with each other and how I interact with them. In the story, I am showing Alice, the focal student character, how standing and walking around the room while individual work is taking place could be a distraction to her fellow classmates.  I then ask that she return to her seat. At this moment, I take the time to explain my reasoning for having her sit down, and, thus, I show her.  As a result of my explaining why, the classroom is made into a space in which collaboration is valued and traditional power dynamics are disassembled for the good of the student and their learning (Frye & Wang, 2008).  

By showing, as opposed to telling, I likewise offer to provide my students with a level of navigational capital so that they may understand how it is expected of them when moving about the classroom (Yosso, 2005). As the teacher and an authority figure in the classroom, especially for younger grades, it is a major part of my job to teach students what it means, looks, and sounds like to be in school every day. My job is to show them what is expected of them in school and, by extension, in the world outside of school presently. Yosso writes that navigational capital is the “skill of maneuvering through social institutions. Historically, this infers the ability to maneuver through institutions not created with Communities of Color in mind” (2005, p. 80). Unfortunately, that is true of our present structures in

place for school, but not teaching the kids how to maneuver through institutions would be taking potential cultural capital away from them. If you are teaching kindergarten, you are nearly starting at square one. What I mean by that is that students may have never been in a formal school setting before. In the clip above, I’m rewarding students who show me, physically and vocally, that they are ready to transition to the next activity. One student is seen left on the carpet and not called on until she shows me she knows what I’m asking for. While I disagree that students only focus, listen, and learn when they are in pretzel fold on the carpet, that was already a norm when I took over the classroom. Therefore, I have to hold all students to that standard because that is the physicality that my mentor expects of them, and they will be penalized if they are not seated as my mentor requires. As the authority figure, teaching students how to be in the present world provides them the navigational capital that can set them up to change what it looks like to be a member of society in the future.

What is being taught?

As new students who are just entering the system of schooling this year, much of what is taught to kindergarteners are traditionalized expectations of how students should act within the classroom. These traditional expectations are also reflective of the outside world: how people are expected to act in our society. The kindergarteners “who were less likely to have an understanding of false belief tended to describe teaching as showing, and the ones were more likely to understand false belief tended to describe teaching as telling” (Frye & Wang, 2008, p. 90). Making that distinction between showing and telling indicates that differences in how knowledge acquisition is understood has the potential to affect participation in the classroom during those early years of schooling (Frye & Wang, 2008, p. 91). For students who understand what is being taught as telling, there is no room for collaboration. If teaching is telling, not showing, then the authority figure - the teacher - has a lot of power and control over the classroom. Instead, showing offers students a collaborative experience in which they come to understand why they are being asked to do something.  When I look back at my summer pre-