Shor, "Critical Teaching for Social Change" Reflection

Ira Shor’s reading, “Critical Teaching for Social Change,” wasn’t anything too exciting. Shor discussed how educators need to question their students, allowing them to play an active part in their education. This quote stuck to me right from the beginning when Shor says, “You must arouse children’s curiosity and make them think about school. It is very important to begin the school year with a discussion of why we go to school. Why does the government force us to go to school? This would set a questioning tone and show the children that you trust them and that they are intelligent enough, at their own level, to investigate and come up with answers.” I think teachers need to make the materials as fun and involving with their students they can. I know from being in school for so many years now it can be extremely boring. When students are bored they do not want to participate in class or engage in learning. My service learning was good for the first few weeks then after that we were all bored. As a teacher if you’re bored then your students are most definitely bored and not learning the materials. Everything was becoming too repetitive. During math time my students do rocket math which takes up a decent amount of time, but it is hard to keep them fully engaged because they would rather sit their and do nothing. This is all because they do the same thing at the same time five days a week. Reading also, they all know their weekly sight words, ABC’s, and letter sounds. For a while I was just grabbing a game out of one of the bins, but they all knew how to play so we would be done in ten minutes. So, I started bringing in a blank book, and we just yesterday finished. They came up with everything, and we had to use their sight words in our book. Now they are doing the fun part of coloring, but they loved making the book because it was something different, and they were the creators. This is what Shor is saying, we need to get our students minds thinking in a way that they are interested. Just making it fun, doing projects, researching, anything instead of just getting drilled with information. 

* This picture shows a great example of how Shor wants students involved in their learning. Something so easy can make such a big difference for learning. Teachers just need to incorporate things that students like, and make it part of their learning experience.