Iqbal Novel Study

There is no way I would have had the balls to read this book with my kids if it wasn’t for my teaching partners influence. She has been a rock for me in so many ways this year and I am incredibly grateful for her guidance. We have similar values in practice and have moved physically closer together this year so we can do even more together with our classes.

This novel study was an interesting experience. Given that it was my first novel study, I was not sure at all what I was doing. We explored the book together as a read aloud (which I plan to do way more of next year) and then the students discussed it briefly after and created heir own 3D novel study with different information in different shapes of the study. The work that was produced was not great and because of my lack of experience I am still trying to figure out exactly why. Some of it had to do with their work ethic and inability to work on long term projects a little bit at a time, others had to do with their lack of comprehension of what to do, others with an inability to figure out how to show their learning effectively given the format etc. Others were producing minimal work based on my low standards and expectations for their work.

I learned through this process that there is a time and a place for accepting work as it is, and other times when work should be returned for editing etc to help encourages students to learn and produce their best work possible . One of my mentors a after this said that it has been proven that if you do not give direct feedback right after and have them do it again, the students learning suffers greatly instead they have not demonstrated their understanding of that learning right away to then be able to put it into practice more readily in the future. This reminded me of the “less thinking more doing” learning I had in my internship this year in that they can cognitively understand something, or make it seem like they do, but if you do not get them to try it and check for comprehension, you cannot tell if they really understood what you are trying to say. This concept already makes so much sense for dance of course, you do not give a correction then walk away and assume they can implement it (unless you know the student and know they are capable of doing that from previous experience) so this makes much more sense to me moving forward.

Huge goal for next year is to give quick and immediate feedback right away and ask them to do something with it instead of just giving it.