As I come to the conclusion of my final practicum experience before being thrust into the teaching profession, I have some final remarks to make about this inquiry question I have been exploring. What I have discovered aligns heavily with my latest blog post about a student guided practice. Students become much more motivated when you as the teacher work alongside the students. I have seen students have great ideas and want to do some cool things and I think that as teacher the more we embrace it, the more motivated students we get to have. Some examples I have had of this include some of the following very cool things that happened in my final practicum placement. On a daily we have a block of time set aside for students to do their own self-guided reading. This entails students picking their own book to read to themselves for about a 30min block give or take the day. One day one of my busy students came to me and wanted to make their own book, a book about the atmosphere. We were not really doing anything at the time in class about the atmosphere. Rather than shutting this idea down and making him read I decided to embrace the idea. I actually went to the school library and took out some books for him that talked about earth and the atmosphere. This students spent the next handful of reading classes making his own book. When he finished the book he got to proudly put it on the classroom book shelf for other kids to read. Later on in the week enough kids seen it and wanted to themselves make their own book. I then decided that we would make a classroom book that we could bind and publish and put on our classroom book shelf. All the students were so excited to do this and it all started from me allowing one student to do what he was motivated to do. The more we make an effort to listen to our students the more motivation we can get out of them, and that is my biggest take away from this whole inquiry question I had. We can as teacher create motivation within some maybe tougher subjects in school by simply creating them in a creative way that our students will respond to just a little bit better. Youth are no different than adults, it is easier to learn anything that you are more interested in, that is true for adults and it is certainly true for our youth in our classrooms as well.
