[Danna Kerns-Streett]

Challenges:
-As a white, middle class, woman teaching in an urban environment where the majority of my students are African American I often feel awkward approaching subjects of race.
-As a math teacher I don’t often have time to approach subjects of race and gender.
-Approaching these subjects in an educational way while also acknowledging and accepting student thoughts and feelings on the subject requires a fine balance.
-In art it can sometimes be difficult to cover the set curriculum and still infuse the curriculum with these important topics.

Opportunities:
-Giving students a chance to listen to opinions that are different than their own is a crucial life skill.
-Oftentimes students, especially at the elementary level, only hear their own family’s opinions and often just repeat what they hear at home. Exposing students to different opinions in a respectful environment allows students to form their own opinions.
-In art students have the opportunity to express their thoughts and feelings about difficult content through a different outlet. I know some of my students struggle with anger issues due to lots of baggage from the outside world and art can be an outlet for those struggles and challenging concepts.

[Danna Kerns-Streett]

The role of facilitator is on I have been working towards for a few years now in teaching. As I have been observed and have observed my own teaching via video recording I have realized that I do far too much talking and don’t give my students enough of a chance to talk to each other and certainly not enough time to react to what each other are saying. This year we established some guidelines for “Math Talk”.
1) Everyone’s opinions matter and everyone deserves to be heard.
2) Only one person speaks at a time.
3) Everyone must participate.
We talked about the fact that “participating” can mean actively listening as well as sharing.
To help students start the conversation I also have sentence starters hanging from the ceiling as well. Overall I have seen and heard some great conversations among my students. The key to not swaying the students’ discussions is by asking open ended questions that encourage discussion rather than trying to get them to agree with the teacher.

[Danna Kerns-Streett]

Although I do not teach art I have implemented the circle design in my classroom. At my school we do “Daily Raps” at least 3 times per week. During the Daily Rap students sit in a circle around the classroom and discuss different topics that are affecting them in school such as bullying, peer pressure, cliques, etc. the circle forum is really important because it allows all students to see each other and focus on the conversation. However, there were also some challenges such as logistically fitting 31 students in a circle around the classroom. While I like the idea of not having any tables in the way that’s just not feasible in my math classroom. Another struggle has been what to do when there are side conversations going on. In my room students must’ve move themselves from the circle if they are talking but that does not always solve the problem.

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