Anna Kue Field Placement

For my field placement, I am in a fourth grade classroom at Henry North Elementary School. The school has accommodated many ELL students this year which has brought on quite a challenge for the unprepared staff like my mentor teacher. My classroom has 22 students, but students are added and dropped often. About half of the students are ELL and require extra guidance. Because Henry North has become the elementary school where the ELL students of Lansing have been designated, ESL staff has been hired and pull out the ELL students for half an hour during the day for extra help. But since there are so many ELL students to accommodate the half an hour is simply not enough. A majority of the ELL students in my classroom are behind academically and receive no extra guidance from my mentor teacher resulting in them falling behind even further.

A majority of the classrooms at Henry North are made up of pods - one large room divided into 3 different sections/classrooms. The divisions between the classrooms are simply cabinets and cupboards and does not create a sufficient learning environment. Each class can hear clearly what the other two classes are doing and causes the students to often lose focus and restricts the teacher in what he/she is able to use as learning activities. As a result, all of the students in my classroom sit at their desk throughout the entire day and their learning consists of worksheets and textbooks. Luckily our portion of the pod is the one in the corner that does not involve the other classrooms walking through to use the restroom or to enter the main part of the school. I do wish that the students, especially the ELL students, would be able to learn in other integrated ways rather than reading from a textbook, this however is hindered by the classroom environment.