Fall 2010 Reflection

After working with the student's in my PDS for an entire semester I have engaged with all of the students numerous times. There are two specific students, both with a learning disability, who I have worked with in a small group. One morning I helped them with a worksheet on capitalizing the first letter of words that are days, months, or holidays. Both students had been pulled out for Title One programming during the lesson in the classroom. During our small group work, I learned a significant amount about teaching methods, students prerequisite knowledge, and parental support.
I quickly learned both of the first grade students did not have any prerequisites on the difference between a capital and lowercase letter and could not identify a day of the week, a month, or a holiday. I found it extremely difficult to teach the students the assignment when they had no prerequisite knowledge. Before each question I had to review the prerequisites for identifying the words in the sentence. It was extremely taxing and caused us to spend an hour on a twelve question worksheet but the students were unable to complete the assignment without a review before each question.
As I was struggling with the students after ever question, I continued to question my teaching ability. I continuously wondered what I could do differently to teach the students the objective. I had the students sing the day of the week song and verbally repeat the three different words to capitalize. After I realized having them verbally repeat these things was not helping, I got a small marker board and two different colored markers. As soon as I wrote down words visually on the board and allowed them to change the lower case letter to a capital on the marker board, they seemed to grasp the concept much better. The visual stimulation helped both of the students learn but they still had great trouble relating the word from the marker board to the question on the paper.
After completing this lesson I spoke with the teacher and explained to her about the students lack of prerequisite skills. She told me both of the students had very little parental involvement at home and one of the students single parent can not read or write. I became very frustrated after hearing this because I felt after the hour I spent with them teaching them and reviewing the skills with them that nothing would be reinforced at home. Also, the rest of the class quickly mastered this assignment so they were moving on to a new lesson. I was worried the two students would get pushed along without getting more attention to fully grasp the lesson we had worked on.
During this one lesson I learned many things. I learned how to continuously critique my teaching as I am engaged in the lesson. I was able to be flexible and change my teaching method in the middle of the lesson to adapt to my students needs. I learned how the small group engagement benefited these two students, how important learning prerequisites are to continuing education, and the importance of parental involvement. In addition, I learned how important it is to build a strong relationship with each and every student. A teacher need to have a strong positive influence in a students life to be able to encourage each student to reach their fullest potential. This is significant because this may be the only strong educational relationship a student has.
How should you build a strong relationship with a student and their parent to increase parental involvement?