Field Post 2

This past week, we attended Shaker Heights Middle School. I went to two science classrooms. One was a seventh grade class and the other was an eighth grade class. When I was in the seventh grade class, the students were learning about energy transfers. The students were split up into table groups. Each table had boys and two girls except one table had 3 boys and two girls. The students were working on a worksheet that forced the kids to communicate with each other to find the answers. The teacher walked around the room and allowed the kids to struggle a little bit before he helped them, so the kids would at least attempt the worksheet before giving up. In the eighth grade class, the teacher was leading a community circle. During this time, students get to talk about a specific question to the entire class and build a greater sense of community. The teacher allowed everyone to speak and only let one child speak at a time. In order to ensure that only one child spoke at a time, she passed around a talking stick and made the rule that only the person holding the stick could talk.

What Ayers means by building bridges, is that students need to make connections and grow as a person due to those connections. In all of Ayers examples, the bridge built helps the child learn and grow. In the eighth grade science class, the student built bridges between each other because they all got to express their opinion. The students were able to feel closer as a class and gain more of a community in the room.