The Inspiration for GETTING TO KNOW OUR STUDENTS
One way we educators know an assignment will work is when we’ve tried it ourselves. Here’s one version of a collage assignment I used at the beginning of the school year, inviting students to tell me more about themselves. I used it when I taught middle school, but I’m confident it will be equally useful with older students in high school and college.
A mandala is a symbolic representation of a symbol in a dream, representing the dreamer’s search for completeness and self-unity. We’ll create a picture poem rather than creating a collage with cutouts.
Process
Create a mandala poem with metaphors that tell us which reflects who you are and/or hope to be
A flower
An animal
A bird
A color
A person I admire
A place
A favorite quotation or “saying”
If you’ve assigned a summer reading text, invite students to include a quotation from one of those texts. If you do not summer reading, assign a short story the day before you give this assignment. Invite students to quote from a common story. Or have students read together an engaging poem from which they are invited to quote a line.
Here’s mine incorporating the following: rose, panther, robin, green, Mahatma Gandhi, classroom “Be the change you want to see.”
Anna’s Poem
A robin scampered across the green grass
Chirping and singing with sass
Pausing to peak as though it were hiding in plain view
Just like I used to do.
The thorns on the roses protect it
Like I hoped my cool words would do
When I was having a temper fit.
When they wouldn’t include me, too.
A fleet, black panther streaked across my vision
As I ran track in college to fill my mission
To become a teacher so I could reach
And learn with the students I’d met on the beach
So in the classroom, I could be the light
Like Mahatma Gandhi says of the peaceful fight
“Be the change you want to see”
That’s what I’m still learning to be.