Blog Post # 4 or Letter to Me (PS it's over!!!)

May 1^st, 2014

Dear Lauren on January 1^st, 2014,

        Happy New Year! It’s me. Or is it you? Or more precisely it’s you about four months in the future. You’ll ring in the New Year in a great way, although at the time you’ll be grumpy. Let it go and enjoy the first day of 2014. The first half of the year will fly by. Now, let’s reflect on your student teaching experience since it’ll be over in a week! (I know it’s crazy).

        One thing that you did well this semester was to connect with your students. It will be a struggle at first and they will always drive you crazy, but they will thank you in the long run. They will push you and you will push them to do their best but the rewards will pay off, even if it doesn’t seem like it. You ARE making a difference. Another thing you did well towards the beginning of the semester was to be prepared. You had both of your units planned and copied long before they started! This is so helpful for you because it cuts your stress down and makes your lesson run smoother with the kids. They can tell you were prepared and they react better because of it.

        Something you should have done differently was to think through the requirements you are asking of your students to complete on their assignments and projects. They ask all kinds of questions and thinking through what you’re actually asking them to do will help you to be able to explain it to them better and increase understanding. You also need to think through what you are asking them to know at the end and make sure you reinforce it throughout your whole lesson. You know what’s important for them to know at the end but they may not realize it’s important at the time unless you tell them.

       This program gives you a LOT of information; however, most of it is useful. They are able to make their assignments useful to you and things that you can actually use in the classroom. They model effective collaborative activities that work well with students, for the most part. They set the pace that you should follow and if you do follow it (and not procrastinate), it will relieve some stress from you.

         Something’s you’ll realize the program could have done better would be to vary your pre-student teaching observation schools. Only being able to observe at two schools will limit your viewpoints and make you feel comfortable there. Which in turn makes you feel “homeless” when you can’t find a job you feel like you fit into as well as you do at this school. 

You also need to put in your own study time for the PLT/PRAXIS because just the classes alone wont prepare you.

Final advice: Take a deep breath. You're almost there. When you start in a few days, it will seem like the longest semester ever but I promise it will fly by.

Also, you have the best support system ever. 2013 was trouble but 2014 will show you that you are not alone and you have so many people constantly fighting for you. Cherish them! You are truly blessed.

Enjoy this fantastic learning experience,

Your future self: Lauren

Blog Post #3 or Help!

Hello all!!!

I hope that your semester is still going well and that your KPTP submission went smoothly.

For my reflection, I am asking for your advice on some matters I’m having trouble handling.

1. In my freshman class I have one girl who keeps picking on the boy sitting next to her. She keeps telling him he’s dumb and stupid. He’s recently started referring to himself as dumb/stupid and when I assigned them an assignment to discuss their split identities (home vs school) (sports vs friends) etc, he put that one of his traits was that he was dumb on it.

Here’s what I’ve tried:

I know that they are in AVID together and my CT is in the process of visiting with their AVID teacher.

I’ve revisited the social contract, with the whole class, they  made at the beginning of the semester , reminding them that they said that they would be respectful.

I’ve asked her to change her behavior towards him and she simply rolls her eyes and is back to the same thing again.

 

2. In the same freshman class, I have a student who insists on talking over me and cussing frequently. At some points he refuses to work and disrupts the rest of the class.

Here’s what I’ve tried:

Asking him to change his behavior.

Revisiting social contract with whole class.

Asked to conference privately with him. He refused.

Wrote him up and sent him to the office.

 

Any advice you have on these two matters would be greatly appreciated!!!!!

 

Now for something not so troubling. I recently went to  PLC Literacy meeting where we discussed bringing common core into the classroom and we used a book I highly recommend to everyone called “The Core Six”. It offers great tips and activities for integrating Common Core into your classroom.

Our discussion today was about vocabulary. The leader of the PLC meeting asked us to recall the methods we used to integrate vocabulary into our classroom. I then realized that I haven’t been using any methods to integrate vocabulary. The book has a method and order for integrating vocabulary and I wasn’t using any of them! When I was done being disappointed in myself, I realized that while I am introducing new vocabulary into my unit, I’m not focusing on it or making it known to my students that this is the vocabulary we’re focusing on for this unit! She then provided us with a paper to focus on our unit and what vocabulary words we were using and what methods we might integrate now or in the future. While I realized that there were parts of my unit that I need to re-evaluate before I teach The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian again, it showed me that not everything will be perfect and that’s okay! It also showed me that the great thing about our jobs is that we can learn from our mistakes and improve on them constantly. 

Blog Post #2 or Scaffolding Instruction

Quick Update: I have approximately 2 weeks left on my KPTP unit with the Seniors and will begin teaching freshman over The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie starting tomorrow!!!!!

 

I always struggle with what I’m going to write about in these reflections but after reading this week’s assignment , I suddenly have inspiration! Peter Smagorinsky’s chapter over scaffolding instruction was a great support to the system that the district has implemented that I discussed in my last reflection. The “I Do, We Do, You Do” has been pretty revolutionary for me as my brain had never thought of instructing students this way. Smagorinsky further describes it as an approach that

“relies on instruction that begins with a teacher’s introduction of a concept or procedure through accessible materials, has the students work initially on learning the concept or procedure in small groups that enable exploration and error without penalty, and ultimately has the students working independently as they are weaned away from the teacher’s and fellow students’ support” (22).

One important thing to realize about this approach that Smagorinsky doesn’t address is that this isn’t something you would have to do for the entire lesson. Oftentimes, I try to think of points when my students will struggle with something. Having spent so much time with them, I’ve started to think in terms of what questions they will ask me and what things I will need to clarify. Oftentimes, some activities are relatively straightforward and I feel like my instructions are clear. However some worksheets I’ve given them can confuse them and I want to make sure they do the best work they can. I think that many times teachers think that they want their students to complete the worksheet or activity fully on their own, without help from anyone. We want them to be independent. However, I’ve come to realize that they can never be fully independent if they don’t fully understand the material. Therefore, I’ve tried to work through the first couple of questions or sections of a worksheet with them as a class and in their groups and once I feel like they fully grasp the goal of the activity/worksheet, I let them free to work on their own, as Smagorinsky suggests. Sometimes this may mean I do one problems/example with them, other times for a particularly hard concept, it may require us doing all but one example together.

In addition to this chapter being a support for the district’s ideas on instruction, I also found a few ideas presented in this chapter that stood out to me.

Smagorinsky said that Cindy O’Donnell-Allen said that she does not “want [her students] to rely on her for their interpretations, which she felt would do them little good once they left her class” (22). I know that a lot of my teachers simply told me what important information I needed  to know from a text. They often told me and my classmates how we should be analyzing it and viewing it. When I got to college, I was surprised when the professors did a little of both. They allowed us to share our opinions and also shared theirs. I think it’s natural for us to want to share the information we know or we have taken from a particular work. We payed a lot of money for our education! We should show that! However, I try and hold off my views until they have shared theirs or simply tell them I agree with them. I’ve noticed that many of my students come up with the same views that I have and once they share it there is no reason for me to share.

These are just a few views that I took from this week’s reading and some connections I made while reading it. I hope you all are enjoying student teaching and everything is going well!!

Blog Post #1, or So it begins!

My semester started off with my first ever in-service. We began with an article called “Teaching Isn’t Rocket Science. It’s Harder” by Ryan Fuller. The article was insightful and well written. I recommend it to all pre-service teachers or anyone thinking of becoming a teacher because it highlights the difficulties some can face while teaching and points out some things teachers run into. Many of these things no one realizes. At the time I didn’t realize it but this article set the stage for the way I started this semester. My expectations were that I was fully prepared and, to be honest, had thought through every possible outcome of teaching. I was wrong.

Being at the high school everyday and teaching three to four classes every week has been eye opening. When I used to only attend one class a week, I never realized how involved everything is. I am super appreciative for this semester with the practice and advice I’ve been given. I’ve also started to recall past teachers that I’ve had both in high school and in college and realized how hard I was on them at the time and how good they were at their jobs.

I have also found myself digging out old teaching textbooks from past semesters to try and find new and interesting activities and methods to use in the classroom. I’ve particularly appreciated Pam Cole’s “Young Adult Literature in the 21^st Century”. She offers great activities to help engage and apply students and even has the chapters arranged by genre to help you maximize the most out of her book. I also received a great book at in-service called “The Core Six-Essential Strategies for Achieving Excellence with the Common Core”. It provided some amazing activities you can use to help support and enforce Common Core State Standards. They’re activities to help students actively engage in reading and vocabulary exercises that go beyond simple rote memorization, among other things.

I planned my KPTP unit last semester and started teaching it on the 6^th of January. I’ve found this to be an invaluable experience because I created this unit from scratch and it has gone through many changes. I’ve have been making changes to it recently even, as working with the classes (and being observed) has shown that I need to engage the students more in active participation with their classmates rather than just having them work by themselves. It has been frustrating to not see students turn in work on time and have them miss so many classes. I have one student who did not show up for the first two weeks of class and has since decided to attend (which is awesome) but doesn’t want to do any work and just wants to socialize with other students. It’s hard in motivating him to turn anything in or participate in any activity.

I’m currently editing an unit over The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie as I will begin teaching this mid-February to the freshman. I’ve been co-teaching them on Romeo and Juliet since the beginning of the semester and I look forward to having them read this book. It’ll be a nice change from Shakespeare! I hope all of your semesters are going well and that you are feeling as blessed as I am for this experience!