Rburenstein Process Paper
Capstone Process Paper
Ruben Burenstein
For my senior
capstone I worked privately with students in the Spanish 2 class I assistant
teach as well as research teaching techniques. At the end of the first quarter
Don Marcos and I sat down to choose students that I would help. We chose the
students that seemed to be struggling in the class. During the warm ups of
class I would take the designated students out of class and give them a
worksheet to complete, or an activity. The worksheets would cover things like
conjugations of different tenses, and the activities would be based on
conversation and practical uses of what they’re learning in class. The second
part of my capstone was researching teaching material to help me look back on
my experience teaching these kids, and seeing what I did right or wrong.
I chose this
project mainly because of my history with teaching. My dad used to teach
classes at Drexel so I was first introduced to teaching at a very young age. I
didn’t really want to be a teacher until 8th grade. In 8th
grade I had an amazing Spanish teacher that made me love the language and the
class. It was from this moment until half way through junior year that wanted
to be a Spanish teacher. In the middle of junior year I had a crisis where I completely
lost my faith in teaching and had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. This
is what inspired me to do my capstone. I found out that I would be SAT’ing Don
Marcos’ Spanish 2 class, so I thought that this would be a great opportunity to
see if I enjoyed teaching as much as I thought for three and a half years. I
used my capstone to see if education was something that I could envision myself
doing in the future.
My capstone
addresses the “Inquiry” core value because I had to ask myself what I already
knew about teaching. I also had to ask what kinds of different teaching methods
are useful for different situations, like does a language require a different
style than math? The research I had to do mostly revolved around these
questions, and then occasionally refreshing myself on the material that I would
prepare for an activity or worksheet. I collaborated with my peers and teachers
during this project. I had to collaborate with the kids that I was teaching
because there would be on capstone without them. I also had to collaborate with
Don Marcos and Mr. Sanchez. Don Marcos helped me organize my capstone, as well
as being there as a mentor and support throughout the process. Mr. Sanchez
helped me when I needed a book to help me analyze my work, providing several
that were exactly what I needed. For the presentation core value, I had to
present activities and worksheets to the kids, as well as do the capstone
presentation during the last week of school. For the reflection part of
capstone I read a book The First Days of
School by Harry and Rosemary Wong in order to see what I did correctly, and
what I could have improve on. I compared the techniques discussed in the book
to ones that I had used in order to see how I could improve as an educator.
To complete my
capstone I first did some preliminary research on basic education techniques. I
then made a timeline to make sure that I actually planned worksheets or
activities. Next I started creating or planning the work that the students
would complete. This sometimes required me refreshing myself on the material
they were learning in class incase I had forgotten since I took Spanish 2. I
didn’t take the kids out every day, and stopped creating worksheets and
activities around the middle of April. At this point I got a book to read so
that I could learn more about teaching techniques and compare them to what I
did.
The main obstacles
that I encountered were complications with planning and lack of motivation. The
second problem seemed to stem from the first problem. There were many days
where I had something planned, and then the kids didn’t have a warm up in
class. If they had to work on a project I didn’t feel that it was fair of me to
take them away from something that was significant to the real class and replace
it with practice. There wasn’t really a way for me to overcome this because I
just had to accept that there were days they definitely couldn’t come with me,
and that I would have to find other days. This caused the lack of motivation
because sometimes I would make a worksheet and then the students wouldn’t have
a warm up for a week. After this week was up there was usually a new topic
introduced so all of the things that I planned kind of seemed outdated. This
made me feel like the work I was doing wasn’t being useful so I would get
demotivated and stop creating ideas for a while. I overcame this at several
points by realizing that I had to continue working, but it continued to be a
problem throughout the process.
The main resources
I used were my teachers and father. Don Marcos helped a lot in identifying the
students that I needed to work with being a large reason that I wanted to teach
Spanish. He also provides his Spanish 2 students with links to help them
improve Spanish on their own time, which are the websites that I mostly used to
refresh my memory on topics. Another teacher that was extremely helpful was Mr.
Sanchez. He was there to help me as an advisor whenever I was stuck on
something, and also provided me with the book that I used to reflect along with
several other useful books. Getting information from Mr. Sanchez and Don Marcos
was much more useful than information from a library because they have been
teachers for several years instead of a book that could be inaccurate.
The thing that I’m
most proud of in this capstone isn’t my final result, but little moments that
happened along the way. Whenever a student I was helping said “oh I understand
that now” because of something I showed them it made me feel really good. I also
liked seeing their progress after they said this to see if they actually
understood it, and if they did I was very proud. I also liked seeing the kids
that I was helping perform in class and do better than they were before whether
it was on tests or simply their accent.
From this process
I learned a lot about how to interact with other kids as a teacher. I realized
that it’s hard a lot harder for a teacher that is close in age to the students
because they are taken less seriously. I learned the most about teaching
techniques and ways to be a more effective teacher. The book that Mr. Sanchez
gave me clearly talked about several problems that first time teachers could
have and I could see myself having them if I continued in the style that I had
been. This project helped me realize that even if I feel something might not be
used, I have to do it anyway for my own self-improvement.
If I could do my
capstone all over again I would first write down every mistake that I made this
time and try to fix them. I think that if I fixed all of the mistakes that I
made in teaching this time and work prepared for the students more often, then
I could have made a greater impact on their Spanish speaking skills. I also
think that I could then look back at that process and see what I was still
doing wrong. I would also try to thoroughly document the process of the kids
that I was helping in the class to see if my lessons were helping. I think
looking at their grades starting from when my lessons began and looking again
every week would be interesting to see, as well as provide information on how I
could be more effective. I would also
try to make a larger variety of lessons, or make sure that all of my lessons
were as effective as possible.
My capstone made
SLA a better place because of the people that I helped. Although the kids that
I helped didn’t completely change around their act and start doing great in
Spanish, they did improve a little. I could see when they started to understand
something because of my lesson, and then use it without my help in class. I
also helped because I will now be able to share my information of teaching
methods to other people. I can tell them the basics of how to progress a
students learning, instead of just giving them busywork. SLA is better because
I helped students learn material that they didn’t understand, while improving
my knowledge of teaching.