Since retiring from full-time teaching, I've been tutoring individual students for a public school system. In so many ways, it's a perfect job for me since I really enjoy tailoring the learning for individual students, assessing the success of the teaching, making improvements, and watching a child learn in positive, successful ways.
This summer I'm teaching small groups of students in an ideal summer camp environment. The support for good teaching as well as the location and environment of the camp is a perfect match for me and for learners. The small class size, comfortable classrooms, super teaching assistants and colleagues, and terrific equipment and supplies makes for an ideal learning environment. That said, the teaching has reminded me of one of the greatest challenges teachers face and that's tailoring lessons to meet the needs of the myriad of learners in front of them. It's truly a challenging combination of science and art to craft lessons that engage and teach all students well. It's obviously much easier to do that in an ideal summer camp environment with small groups of students than in a typical public school environment with large class sizes and often less-than-desirable equipment or supports, but no matter how ideal the environment is, the challenge remains.
So how do we craft lessons that meet the needs of all learners in a classroom? Experienced teachers know that there all kinds of strategies to use to make that happen. As for my summer group which totals about 25 in total, I have been trying many different strategies and to date, I've engaged all the students for the most part with the help of my colleagues with the exception of one student. Today I'll try another strategy in an effort to engage this student who is somewhat resistant to the learning. I noticed a particular talent that this student has and I've incorporated that talent into today's lesson--let's see if it grabs her attention and pulls her into the learning. Time will tell.
I wanted to write this post to clear my head with regard to how to meet this challenge, and I also wanted to write this post to acknowledge the challenge that good teaching is. It's tough to engage every learner in a positive way, but it's the exactly right aim of every classroom teacher to reach for positive engagement and learning for every student. That's possible and that should be the aim of every school and every classroom. Onward.