1st Day of School - Again

I started my 6th 25-day rotation of 4th grade keyboarding (4 sections of 20-30 students, 2 in one school, 2 in another) today and it’s just amazing how my teaching has changed since the beginning of the year. It may be my first year teaching, but I was fairly certain when I walked into my first 4th grade class in September that I knew what to do and how to do it. The interesting thing is that I don’t think I’m necessarily a better teacher now, but I’m definitely more efficient and reflective. My classroom management has improved and my lessons have all changed drastically. I’m in a unique position - I teach an average of 3 sections (4 this round) for 25 days and move on to the next schools and start all over. I have taught this same material approximately 13 times already this year and am starting on 14, 15, 16, and 17. Every computer lab is different and every group of students is different. I’ve had 2 labs where I wasn’t able to use the projector, which made teaching those sections much more difficult. I’ve had groups of 32 students and a group of 16 students - I’m sure you can guess which was easier there!

Every group of students is different because of many things, but the 2 most important that I’ve noticed is the school they’re in and the classroom teacher they have. I’m not judging any group, not at all, but I just find it fascinating how different 4th graders can be. The group dynamics are amazing, as any teacher knows, but the fact that I change groups so often make the differences really striking.

The differences in my teaching amaze me too and I think it’s been the best learning experience ever to have to adapt to so many new environments and situations. I substitute taught before entering this position and I truly believe that subbing is something every teacher should have to do. I’m all for adding substitute teaching to teacher preparation programs (one quarter student teaching, one subbing) - why not let the education students earn some money while training? I’ll argue that it’s one of the very best ways to practice classroom management skills in a “live” setting while seeing numerous classroom and school settings (and staff dynamics). I subbed in 4 districts, K-12, across all disciplines, and learned more than I could ever write here.

One of the main changes I’ve made to my teaching is really simplifying the curriculum. I started out using a keyboarding program called Bernie’s Typing Travels which requires students to login and although it does save their work, it would take these 4th graders months to ever actually learn the entire keyboard. I’ve switched to a free online program called Dance Mat Typing that doesn’t save work, but gets the kids through the alphabet and some punctuation in about 15 or less 30-minute class periods after being introduced to the homerow and proper posture. This leaves us 2 weeks to actually USE the keyboarding skills, where before I was finishing up learning our last letters on the last day of class. (I didn’t want to pick apart the two programs here, but can if anyone is interested…………)

I’m also doing a lot less dictation and letting the students move through the lessons at their own pace and helping individually as needed. I found that while some students really needed dictation to understand finger placement, the majority of students are able to move through the lessons with minimal correction. My main objective, besides the obvious one of teaching touch typing, is maintaining motivation and excitement for doing the activities. The students seem to really enjoy using DanceMat and working at their own pace, and by my observation and their final WPM rates, their skills have improved at a greater rate than they did while using my previous teaching method. Many students are practicing at home with no prompting from me, which is one of the advantages of an online program.

I’ve experimented with a lot more things that I mentioned here, but you can get the idea that while it might not be all that exciting to teach the same thing over and over and over and over……………………it is an effective method for evaluating teaching methods and great practice for adapting to new environments. Many of the teachers I work with only re-teach material once every year (if that) and are in the same classroom year after year. While I do hope to end up in a position where I have my own classroom and have longer periods of time with students (and meatier subjects than keyboarding……..I just dream of getting to teach accounting!), I have to admit that as a new teacher, this is probably the best way I could have started. I’d be really interested to see if there’s any way possible for this kind of experience to be implemented in teacher prep programs - I’m a convert.

Let’s keep that on the DL, though, don’t want administration to think I want to do this forever - I’m initiated, ready to move on up :-) C’mon Kate’s classroom, where are you?

You can see all of my keyboarding resources here: Keyboarding Links