Chapter 5: Teaching to the Individual, Working with the Group

This chapter focused on how to teach students individually and how to teach them in groups. There are many different students in every classroom. Some of these “types” include the eye-roller, the wallflower, the hand-writer, the dreamer, the con artist, the goof-off and the workhorse. Each type of student brings something different to the classroom whether it is good or bad. It is important that teachers take note to which student falls into which category, especially when it comes to having them work in groups. Because each student is considered a different “type” it is helpful that teachers understand this in order to be realistic in what they want each student to accomplish. A teacher would not want to put all the goof-offs in one group because it would be pretty certain that nothing would get done. During group work it is also important for teachers to assign each person a job such as the recorder, the facilitator or the material getter. This way each student is assured that they will be helping out the group.

I found the different “types” of students to be interesting and actually consider myself to be more than one. I would consider myself to be a wallflower, a workhorse and even a little bit of an eye-roller. I always do my work and come to class prepared yet I don’t always like to raise my hand with the answer. I am not necessarily an attention grabber so most of the time; I like to keep to myself even when I know the answer. However, I can also consider myself a bit of an eye-roller because when a teacher embarrasses me or does not notice my effort it upsets me and I can become aggravated throughout the rest of the class. I also agree with what this chapter said about rolls in group work because there have been many times when I have been in a group and forced to do most of the work by myself if I wanted to get a good grade.