I agree resoundingly with the comments about what unique experience it has been to be a student
teacher in CPS these past two weeks! As
with most of my classmates, I think I tried to keep my ears open and listen to
the many different voices and perspectives people in Chicago took on the CTU
labor strike: the CTU teacher members and leaders, the administration, the
janitorial and other support staff, the parents, Chicago’s citizens, Chicago’s
government, the CPS Board of Education, the people from out of town and out of
state, to name some.
Today, upon returning to the Bret
Harte kindergarten classroom, I realized that there was definitely a voice and
perspective that I hadn’t paid as much attention to in all of the hubbub of the
strike experience: that of the students!
My mentor teacher, Meghan, read two books and facilitated two limited,
but important, inquiry based discussions today.
These books have already been mentioned in previous posts: Click, Clack, Moo and Animal Strike At the Zoo. Meghan interestingly started her mini-lesson
by asking if our students knew what “taking a vote” meant, took some students’
responses and then gave her own definition.
She then asked her students to one-by-one tell her their vote on which
book they wanted to read. It was almost
a split classroom, with 11 students voting for one and 12 voting for the other.
My MT ended up reading both
stories, however, and somewhat ambiguously asked the students if they had any
questions about the book or the strike CPS had for the past seven school
days. The kindergarteners ended up
having quite a few and I really enjoyed seeing my MT let them think and wonder
aloud with each other about something that really, really affected them.
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