The Importance Of Building Relationships

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

This project has helped me realize the kind of teacher that I want to be. Prior to this class, I had jumped around from job to job unsure of my place as an educator. I have taught elementary school, high school, and adult ELLs. I have implemented multiple styles and methods of teaching over the past three years. It wasn’t until this project that I really understood who I was as an educator. I have learned that I want to teach reading to ESL students at the elementary school level. I recognized my passion for teaching literacy while I was researching for my literature review. I also realized that I want my classroom to be interactive and fun. Learning happens when students are engaged in the material.

Learning happens best when the material is relevant, students are engaged, and they feel safe and secure in the classroom. I believe this can only happen when the teacher has first built a relationship with each individual student in the classroom. In order to actively engage my students, I need to understand the students' different learning styles, academic histories, interests, home life situations, and their strengths and weaknesses. I take the time to learn about each of my students through assessments, one-on-one conferencing, observations, and collaboration with colleagues. I take an interest in their life. It is imperative that I know who I am teaching; each student is different, which makes each classroom unique.

The creation of this portfolio has helped me understand the importance of building relationships with colleagues, parents, and students. Building relationships helps you get to know your students’ needs, it helps you meet those needs, and it helps you create a safe learning environment where students feel comfortable. I have also learned how to be a leader at my school and in my community. It is important to advocate for your students and other students facing similar problems. Professional developments help educate others about the struggle your students face, and how they can be a part of helping them. Community involvement helps you share your knowledge with others, and also it gives you a chance to reach out to others who may need your services.

Multiple teaching philosophies have shaped my style of teaching. My teaching style varies depending on the class. With each group of students I consider their different learning styles, their native language, and their English language proficiency level prior to creating my lessons and objectives. Students from different backgrounds or lower proficiency levels may require a portion of the lesson to be more systematic than communicative. Teachers should have balance and consistency of delivery because it is vital for English language learners. I consider myself more of a facilitator in the classroom. I believe students learn and retain more information from hands on, active learning. Therefore, during every class, students work in cooperative learning groups to help one another complete a task. The group activities are derived from SIOP strategies and EX-ELL strategies to help foster engagement. Furthermore, while students are working in small groups, I am able to work more one on one with students: progress monitoring and checking for understanding and mastery.

These ten articles have given me insight into the best practices for teaching reading to students of all ages and backgrounds. ESL is a complex discipline to teach because you teach students with varying needs and abilities. All students have different backgrounds in literacy. Some students are literate in their first language, others have had interrupted education, and other students have never been to school and have little or no knowledge of how to read or write. These students with few literacy skills face many challenges entering primary or secondary school. Many ESL teachers are not trained about how to teach literacy skills to beginning level readers.

Through my research, I found multiple strategies to help ESL teachers tackle this challenge of teaching reading. All of my findings proved reading interventions to be to most effective method of teaching struggling readers. It proved more beneficial than ESL pull-out classes, communicative approaches, and whole language approaches to teaching English. Some of the articles mentioned the importance of explicitly teaching phonics and phonemic awareness the same as one would teach a native speaker how to read in primary school. For instance, teaching vowel combinations, onsets and rimes, and morphemes. The lessons need to be engaging and interactive, and teachers need to be instructed how to teach these strategies. Also, there were many strategies for comprehension that included teaching students reading strategies explicitly. For example, teaching students how to use context clues, decoding skills, and how to infer meaning to help with comprehension. Other strategies dealt with developing fluency and vocabulary. In order for students to improve their fluency, students should echo read and listen to tape recorded readings. Vocabulary instruction worked on building knowledge of how large words can be broken down into smaller units. The research has left me with a better understanding of how to teach struggling readers in my classroom, and how important it is to expose other teachers to these strategies as well.

Developing this portfolio has proved to be a positive impact on my students, community, colleagues, and families. During the development of this project, I built strong relationships with my parents and students. I created an after-school tutoring program for students and parent. These relationships helped me identify a student for special education services, raise student achievement, and prevent student failure. Building relationships with my colleagues helped me better serve the ESL population at my school. I was able to give content area teachers strategies to use to help their ESL students, and I received ideas from other ESL teachers about strategies I could implement in my classroom. Through my community involvement, I was able to help adults learn to read. It was a great feeling reaching out to others outside of my classroom.