Coming into Comp Camp, I was confident in my ability to speak to a room. I was sure that this would naturally translate to teaching. However, I found myself fumbling a bit in my transitions and not letting my personality shine through. I was hyper focused on the need to get the material right so that I wasn’t allowing a natural flow of the class to develop. However, in Monday’s class, I trusted my intuition about the flow of the class which allowed me to bring my personality to the classroom. Murray says:

If acceptance is hard for the writer, it is harder still for the teacher, for education is geared up for sameness.

Allowing my personality to show in class allowed the students to show their personalities as well. Accepting me and how I work encouraged my students to do the same. In our debrief of Brandt’s Sponsors of Literacy, and to a further extent in our Show vs. Tell activity, the students presented a diversity of opinions, approaches, styles, and personalities that was refreshing and enjoyable. A couple of students pulled me aside and shared ideas they were passionate about.

This sharing of personality and diverse points of view was also reflected in the quality of the group work during Monday’s class, whereas group work on the second day of class was less fruitful and less effective. It is entirely possible that the students considered some of Friday’s group work to be busy work because there wasn’t a huge amount of direction between the literacy quiz and the group discussion that followed it. I didn’t give them any particularly new guiding information. Bean says:

Because many students expect teachers to lecture, they will better accept collaborative work as ‘serious learning’ if the teacher explains how the task relates to the course goals.

At every point in Monday’s class, I provided more information than the questions of prompts they were to use in their group work. I framed questions and suggestions as far as things I wanted us as a class to get out of each activity. Relating each activity to goals that piqued both my interests and those of the curriculum seemed to allow more buy-in from the students.

Furthermore, making it clear that I am part of that collaboration as well lets them know that I’m not necessarily looking for one answer over the other, but that I’m really looking for the learning each of them take from the material and each other. In turn, I can relate that to our future tasks and projects, further encouraging goal-oriented work.