It’s the end of another semester, and as I transition from an academic year focused always on teaching and my students to a summer full of research, it’s time again for a final reflection.

I spent a lot of this semester feeling less than fully present.  I’m not sure if it was the fact that I was teaching two classes at school sites, rather than at the university, which made me feel a bit like a nomad, or if it was due to the 7-9:45pm Monday night class, which I had forgotten the joys of after a semester hiatus from evening classes that allowed me to be home to tuck my son in every night.  Whatever it was, I wondered if my students got the best of me each session.

But, what I realized this semester is that my teaching isn’t really about me at all.  This semester, I more fully approached the idea of “student centered” learning and decentralized my practice so that it wasn’t all about me and what I could give students, but how they could contribute to one another.  Sure, I facilitated that process through modeling responsive feedback and assigning a ton of discussion board posts (sorry, students…well, not really sorry though) and we still learned a lot of strategies through modeling, reading & discussion, but it was a shift in my identity that really contributed to a sense of professional community.

Next semester, I’m hoping to decentralize a bit further and help students draw from the text more clearly.  I’ve been struggling with the place of our course texts in the classroom and I’d really like to do more with them, even just having students tweet about a strategy they found helpful or a question they had in relation to the text.

As one of my students said last night in our final web activity for our course, it’s important for us to reflect on our practice regularly.  It was really encouraging to hear those words. It was encouraging to know that students thought regularly about schema, Vygotsky, language levels of students & literacy in planning their content-based lessons.  It was encouraging to hear the value placed on authentic & responsive feedback, on empathizing with the feelings an EL student faces in the classroom.  It has been encouraging to see the ongoing growth of all my students this semester, growth that pulled me back in those inevitable moments (particularly in the last 1/3 of the semester) where I begin to wonder what I’m doing and if they actually are getting anything from the course.

Thank you, thank you, EDSE 436 & EDSE 457, Spring 2014 semester.  It has been a pleasure learning from and with you and it has been a great privilege watching you learn from another. I will see you around, and remember, “We’ll always have twitter.” 🙂