Mary Kempen

12/18/14
Reflection on field experience
What I learned from my observations during my field experience at a middle school and a high
school mostly confirmed what I have studied during my coursework. I have now seen that students in
this age range are very perceptive and eager to build relationships with their teachers. The high school
students I observed were immensely curious about their teachers cars and attentive when she shared
stories from her familys history. They played at guessing my favorite color based on my clothing
choices and asked about my plans for the weekend. In the middle school, the fifth grade language arts
students loved their teacher and were thrilled when they had the chance to work one-on-one with him
on their writing projects. These examples showed me how a good relationship with the students makes
them strive to perform to the best of their abilities. The fifth grade students especially were intent on
producing quality work and sharing it with their peers and teacher. To my surprise, these students
sometimes grasped literary concepts and vocabulary as well as some of the students I have taught in
college classes.
On the other hand, the high school and middle school students I observed behaved as Piaget
would predict for adolescents who are entering the formal-operational stage of development.
Metaphor was difficult for both the fifth graders, who read a poem that compared the fog to a cat and
then chose to write poems comparing other animals to weather phenomena in ways that seemed
disconnected, and the high school seniors, who could make no sense of the Ricky Martin song in which
the lover desired that his beloved enter his wound and merge with his blood. These experiences remind
me that vocabulary, grammar, and even cultural differences may not be the only issues I need to
consider as I plan Spanish lessons for my students. I must also take into account the learners capacities
to understand and make abstractions depending on their level of cognitive development.

Furthermore, I should bear in mind my students emotional and social development. On

different days I witnessed disciplinary actions taken by the teacher to correct behavior that resulted
from students emotional outbursts. These were usually due to exuberant interactions with peers that
got out of control, such as the case where a friend had marked the disciplined students shirt with a pen
and provoked the wearer to shout an expletive. These students are learning the boundaries of
appropriate social behavior at the same time they are seeking the approval of their classmates.
Professor Langeberg is right; students at this age love to touch each other. As a language teacher, I can
find ways to channel the students desire to interact with each other into learning activity. I noticed that
the students responded positively when they were given opportunities to communicate with each other
such as reading each others poems or asking each other questions at the beginning of Spanish class.
When I led the eighth grade class through a Family Feud-style game in which they had to guess their
classmates answers to a series of homework questions about family members, the students became
very enthusiastic, and more students participated in the team activity than I had expected. They
seemed to appreciate the rare occasion in which their homework mattered after it was completed and
what they had to say would be of importance to their peers. I take these results as evidence that a
constructivist approach to education can be effective. These observations also support the current
focus on communicative modes (interpretive, presentational, and interpersonal) in ACTFL and Wisconsin
standards for foreign language programs. The students seemed to enjoy class most when they were
participating in activities that had a communicative purpose, such as interpreting songs or a telenovela
or engaging in a conversation with a partner.
As I plan my own classes, I intend to create daily opportunities for students to communicate
with each other. I believe these experiences should be more frequent than they often are, and students
will develop more confidence to speak in unfamiliar contexts if they practice often responding and
initiating unscripted conversation. I also plan to incorporate elements of Hispanic cultures into my

lessons as much as I can. The telenovela the Spanish 4 students viewed in segments provided excellent
possibilities for exploring cultural viewpoints and values such as the respect or lack thereof accorded to
manual labor. The Ricky Martin songs afforded opportunities to discuss how emotions are expressed
differently in different cultures. Even the process of choosing a Spanish name could lead to an
investigation of why Hispanics choose the names they do for their children. The students might like to
find out why someone would name a daughter Pilar, which means pillar. (The name refers to a
statue of the Virgin Mary in the city of Zaragoza, Spain, symbol of one of the oldest Christian
communities in Spain.) If they should all choose the same name, as did the 7 boys who wanted to be
called Dante, they could learn that Hispanics in this situation use both their first names and their
middle names, sometimes combining the two in a contraction. I had not previously considered having
the students choose new names for Spanish class, but after seeing how the practice successfully
engaged the students in the classes I observed, I will now try it with my own students.
On the whole, my field experience encourages me to try new things I did not plan before. The
games and token economy used in the classes I visited were more effective at keeping the students on
task and practicing recall than I would have predicted and encourage me to try something similar. The
fifth grades exercises in creative writing and constructing complex and compound sentence suggest to
me that I can expect high school students to have reference points to these literary and grammatical
concepts as I teach them in a language foreign to them, even if I may need to refresh their memories or
address the points as lessons learned incompletely in the fifth grade. The middle school students skills
assure me that I can have high expectations for high school students and that the learners can meet
them. At the same time, I will need to develop procedures for completing classroom tasks more
explicitly than I have before if I am to successfully maintain order in my class since my students will be
developing the self-control skills that I have previously seen at an already developed stage. I will
experiment with seating charts and homework policies to maximize student learning time. Much of

what I will teach my middle and high school students is the same as what I taught my college students,
such as grammar and vocabulary, but I appreciate my field experience for showing me what I may need
to change.