'New Teacher' Is Now A Veteran
Teacher Bob Gentilli works on a fall scarecrow project with Belleville 8th-grade students (left to right) Patricia Boley, Trevor Binger, Kainan Loebbaka, Savanna Atkins, and Carly Gillam.
By Harvey Black
Contributing writer
Advice from a veteran teacher Looking back over his experiences, 15-year teaching veteran Bob Gentilli of Belleville offers these pointers for teachers entering their own classroom for the first time: • Teach to the whole child. Establish relationships. Teach them about their place in the world, to be better listeners, readers, problem-solvers, decision-makers, partners in education. • Earn respect, don’t expect it to happen. Make them feel special and wanted. In today’s society they can feel lost and overwhelmed. • Engage your students. Work time is crucial in monitoring their progress. It is a great time to ask them probing questions to each individual student. • Keep parents aware and involved. Use e-mails and Web sites. Send progress reports home but also send the encouraging thoughts about their students. • Show compassion and emotion. Let students know how you feel. • Challenge and excite. Make connections to the outside world. Let the kids develop their multi-intelligences by touching, hearing, communicating; simulate life experiences as much as possible. Employ authentic learning and assessment – let students use the skills they have and develop the ones they are struggling with. Check and recheck their understanding with probing questions. • Use different modes of instruction to reach all intelligences – visual, auditory, etc. Focus on your delivery and directions. State, restate, provide examples and model your objectives. • Regarding behavior, employ the Three Cs: Confront (let them know what they did, how to correct it), Compromise (give constructive discipline; give students the responsibility to select a consequence), and Conference (talk to parents, other teachers, principal about what the student has done). • Observe. Go into your peers' classrooms, and not just in your content area.
Every teacher has great ideas that we can all use. • Work with student teachers. Get refreshed with their energy and new ideas. • Keep your perspective. Life is all about your role in the classroom and your life experiences.
The most important time is the present. • Reflect. We constantly need to look at what we are teaching and how we are doing it. The process of achieving National Certification was very difficult, but it forced me to analyze my teaching strategies,
especially in the areas of reading and writing. |
Eleven years after he wrote a
journal about what it was like to be a new teacher, Bob Gentilli says he still loves the job and, “My excitement level is greater than ever.”
In 1992, Bob Gentilli entered his classroom for the first time as a full-fledged teacher of social studies to 7th and 8th graders in Belleville. Four years later, he wrote a journal that appeared in WEAC publications and is still available online.
Now, looking back from the vantage point of 15 years, Gentilli – who still teaches at the same grade level and continues to coach – says, “I felt I wasn’t prepared to teach” in 1992. He describes things then as “almost an industrial factory.”
“We still cared for them, and we like to think we taught them well. It was so much more academic then. We were a junior high, and we prepared them for high school.”
Today, he describes his approach as much more encompassing what he terms, “the whole child.”
“These kids have homes, they have families. They need to be loved; they need to be cared for, not just at home, but here as well,” he said.
“My motto is, if I can make a difference for one student in a day, my day is complete,” he said.
“We’re trying to make things relevant for them. Right now we’re talking about 9-11,” he said during an interview in September. “It’s not just facts about what happened on 9-11. It’s more analytical thought.” He tries to get his students to become more aware of the world around them.
Gentilli makes it clear that he does not see himself as someone dispensing wisdom for his students to scoop up and absorb. “It’s not quantity anymore, it’s how you teach,” he said. He views teaching as a cooperative effort, involving kids as much as possible.
“You’re not giving 100 assignments a week; you’re focusing on teaching one concept really well. In that regard it’s not frustrating anymore because I don’t have to do 100 different things,” he said.
The pace of instruction, he said, has slowed. And the number of students in his case load has dropped significantly. He’s gone from having to deal with between 150 and 160 students to working with 100. Also, with block scheduling now in place, the change from 45 minutes to 65 minutes creates time to check for understanding and for the kids to start or finish their assignments. “We can stay with a task longer,” he said.
“The hard part is you’re teaching the talented and gifted, you’re teaching the middle, and you’re teaching the lower-level kids, on top of all the custodial needs of all the students,” he said. And that diversity, he said, makes it difficult to reach every single student.
Technology has brought positive changes to Gentilli’s life as a teacher. He talks of the way e-mail has increased contact with parents. Though he says that contact is “impersonal,” since he doesn’t meet parents or talk with them on the phone the way he did a decade ago, he said the use of e-mail has brought him closer to the parents.
“We send out progress reports every week, we have the grades online, and parents can check them at home,” he said.
“I can jump on e-mail, and within a minute parents are going to know if Johnny didn’t do his assignment today,” he said.
And the parents, he finds, are willing to use e-mail to make their views heard.
“Parents say more in an e-mail than they would face to face,” he said, adding that that builds trust.
All his years in the classroom have not dampened Gentilli’s ardor for teaching, and he conveys that to his students, telling them, “This is not a job; I get to go to school every day.”
He is pleased to be among younger colleagues. At age 41 he is the second-oldest of his colleagues, with everyone else being under 30. He enjoys the camaraderie, with everyone being able to “bounce ideas off each other. We have staff who are willing to share ideas and strategies and put themselves out there,” he said.
Gentilli said he is pleased with how teacher training has changed. When he first began, he observed in his 1996 journal “how impractical college courses sometimes are in preparing you and me for teaching.” But now he finds himself quite impressed with the way teachers are prepared to enter the classroom.
“Teacher training to me has gone leaps and bounds on the side of better teaching. They’re definitely walking the walk,” he said of professors who are training teachers. After earning two master’s degrees and becoming Nationally Certified, he said, “The way the college teachers are teaching is the way we’re teaching in our classroom. That’s really comforting to see.”
And he sees those changes reflected in the “awesome” student teachers whom he has had in his classroom. “I have had five student teachers in the last 10 years,” he said. “They come in with new ideas, strategies and energy that I can use in my teaching.”
One aspect of education that Gentilli did not experience when he began is the “No Child Left Behind” act. With its emphasis on test scores, some argue that it limits curriculum and forces teachers to “teach to the test.”
Gentilli said he resists that temptation.
“I will continue to teach to the whole child – with emphasis on problem-solving, decision-making, teamwork, character building,” he said. “Our society needs that.”
OnWEAC New Teachers Page
Posted November 6, 2007