Promising Practices*

Promising Practices was a great experience for me, even though I didn't want to wake up at 7:30, it was well worth it in the end! When I first got there I registered then went through the Curriculum Resource Fair and chatted with some of the people there and got a ton of free books and stuff it was great!!!

Then I went to my first workshop which was Yoga and it was so great!!! It was all about the stress levels in the students and how if you practice breathing techniques and learn how to control it then the stress level never gets too high. When I first got there we did a breathing technique and closed our eyes and imagined we were at the top of a stair case and at the bottom was complete relaxation and then we went through it. Then she talked about how anxiety in students is huge right now and that a lot of students have to deal with it when it can be controlled. She was saying how she does yoga in the classroom and the students are a lot more focused through out the day. After she does yoga with them she has them write in their journal about how relaxed they feel or how stressed they still feel etc. Some of the students in the classroom have to go to a counselor to help them control their anxiety but for most of the kids yoga really helps them. Each time they take time out of their day to do yoga the teacher makes it a theme and ties it into what the students are learning at that time and then they write about it. This was very familiar to me because I have anxiety and I go to a counselor and we always practice breathing methods and different things that can help me get through an attack. I absolutely LOVED this workshop and when I become a teacher I want to get certified to teach yoga so that I can bring this into my classroom because I think it would really help the students focus and learn easier!!!

The second workshop that I went to was about different methods of teaching. There were 3 different teachers and each teacher was focused on a couple of students and tried to help them learn more efficiently. The first teacher that spoke was a 1st grade teacher in the Providence school system. She said that she would always have a student that would not listen and had a behavioral problem and she wanted to help them and make them focused and learn. So she focused more on them. She felt that when the students came and sat on the rug to do their activities that the students could never stay in their own space and it would get all out of hand so she asked the students what they wanted to do to learn the different activities. Some said at their seats and others said on the rug so she did it half and half through out the week. For the student that had the behavioral problem she let them sit where ever they felt was comfortable to them at that time so that they could focus, and when they couldn't she would let them go to a different room to gather themselves up and start to focus again to come back to the classroom. The next teacher was a special education teacher in a room where there was a general teacher as well and she was a teacher in elementary school. What she wanted to know was when the students worked together in partners and they choose their own partner if things the work got done or if she partnered the students together herself if it would work out better. So she partnered up the classroom and had a student at a lower learning level and then a student at a higher learning level pair up and she found that even though the students really never had spoken before the activity the students seemed to get along great and the work ended up getting done accurately. Most of her students spoke Spanish so they could also communicate and explain different things in Spanish so that both of them could understand each other. The third teacher was just strictly a special education teacher with students who were deaf, blind, in wheel chairs etc and she was in a middle school. What she wanted to do was have students from a general class come into her special education class to spend time with her students in the social aspect and as well as helping them cook, read, play games etc. The students ended up coming into her classroom and helping out her students and she noticed that in the hallways they would say hi to each other and she noticed how much the general students loved coming in and spending time with her students. I really enjoyed this workshop as well! This workshop reminded me of a couple authors that we have read throughout the semester. One of the authors would be Delpit because each of the teachers had their their own direct style of teaching and they really helped out each one one of their students and tried to make school an awesome place to be! Another author that came to mind would be Collier because the second teacher that spoke partnered her students up with a child who was a lower level learner with a higher level learner student and they both spoke Spanish so they could conversed in Spanish as well to explain certain things to each other so that they could understand completely.

The keynote speaker, Tricia Rose was AMAZING!!!! I loved how real she was like she wasn't putting on an act for the audience, she was just so real and seemed that she spoke from her heart. I really liked her story about the girl who was presenting to her class and said that her computer was acting "gay" in the class and how the students felt hurt by what she said and how she as the professor had to address it the next class. I think that she addressed it very well and that no one really got hurt in the end. She was an extremely powerful speaker, and everything that she said connected with this class and it made a lot of sense to me. I loved her pledge, I thought it was really great that she came up with something like that. She was awesome and I really enjoyed listening to her!!!

I really enjoyed the conference and I learned so many things from it!!

This is one of the poses that we learned in the yoga workshop! This is the warrior pose.

This is another yoga pose, its the downward dog pose!