Personal Narrative: My Community Engaged Learning

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My Community Engaged Learning (CEL) experience came from the 5th grade class at Brown Elementary School where I observed the classroom, and student teacher relationships Tuesdays and Thursdays throughout the semester. Brown Elementary is a low poverty school in Jackson, Ms. Due to the lack of teachers, the classroom I observed was the entire 5th grade class, approximately 30 students. For the sake of privacy, I will refer to the teacher I observed as Mrs. X. The first day I entered the classroom, I quickly noticed the negativity in the classroom and the disciplining style Mrs. X implemented in the classroom full of 11-12 year old students. Mrs. X pulled me to the side later that day and informed me that “I have to speak to the children in this …show more content…
Teaching styles are similar it parenting styles in that there are passive, uninvolved, authoritative, and authoritarian. Research on teaching styles has concluded that “the authoritative teacher is demonstrably in control of the classroom environment, and has a clear agenda and purpose, while encouraging the [students] to develop their self-determination and independence within reasonable boundaries” (Allen, 2010). Mrs. X is not an authoritative teacher and therefore created a classroom that was acceptable to bullying especially teacher to student bullying. She was focused on gaining dominance over the classroom, and did not care to help develop the student’s …show more content…
Kathleen Allen (2010) included in her research a list of variables that will create a classroom that is virtually impossible to create a positive learning environment:
1. An over-reliance on punitive methods of control.
2. Unclear rules for student deportment.
3. Lack of administrative support for staff, little staff support of one another, and a lack of staff agreement with policies.
4. Academic failure experience.
5. Student lacking critical social skills that form the basis of doing well academically and relating positively to others, such as persistence on task, complying with requests, paying attention, negotiating differences, handling criticism and teasing.
6. A misuse of behavior management procedures.
7. Lack of student involvement.
8. Lack of understanding or appropriate responding to student differences.
Most of these variables, if not all, were observed at Brown Elementary. Perhaps when Mrs. X stated that she had to speak negatively to the students she was believes that all these variables were working against her, and she could not teach