What I learned through reflecting through entries on my teaching practices had a lot to do with my philosophies, my effective and ineffective teaching times and methods as a student teacher, and allowed me to keep track of my memories throughout this experience. I focused a lot of my journals on my weeks overall. I noted any circumstances and experiences through IEP meetings and conferences, scenarios with students and how I overcame the scenario or conflicts, and the communication I kept with parents, staff, and administration. It allows me to go back and refer to these times as a future teacher and see what I did in my past student teaching and how I handled a previous scenario, conflict, positive moment, or overall lesson experience.

I really am going to take everything positive away from this experience. The fantastic support from my cooperating teacher, the staff at my school, my peers, and my professors has been outstanding. My cooperating teacher has given me the world to look forward to. She was the best mentor and role model I could have had as a student teacher. You hear horror stories of people not getting the most of their experience but as long as you are open and willing, you WILL get the most of the experience and become a better teacher by the end of it.  As this chapter comes to a close there is so much that awaits me in my future. Getting a job, creating a classroom that’s mine, being the teacher of students who will hopefully remember me as a role model, and of course graduation. The ups and downs were certainly worth it, and looking back I really couldn’t have picked a better path and future for myself.

Till next time!

Ms. P

Full takeover has come to an end, and I am about a week away from graduation. I’ve learned a lot about myself throughout this experience and I wanted to share some goals I have for myself that reflect my teaching philosophy and who I am.

Goals that I have for myself for the future are to ensure positive reinforcement, include as much interactive and engaging lessons in my teaching, and ensure fairness for rules and expectations for all students and classes. The most important one to me is the first goal that I have: ensuring positive reinforcement. I had a lot of practice with this throughout my placement, as my coop was a great role model in keeping up with positive reinforcement and focusing more on the positive than the negative. I started calling home when students were doing exceptionally well (especially focusing on those students who did not always get the positive phone calls home), and I made sure that as a class they were rewarded either individually or as a whole when their behavior and expectations were great! For example, when all students in a class had brought their textbook to class and no time had to be spent finding students books to lend or escorting them to lockers, I would ensure to give the class staRRR tickets and extra bonus points in our class cup. This kept the students spirits high and encouraged them to continue following the expectation or good behaviors. The second goal is including as much movement and engagement in my lessons as possible. I noticed how well my students progressed from our first pair and group project to where I am at now when each class. It’s always a scary thing to try out for the first time. You think to yourself will they get too loud, will students not stay on task, will someone feel left out or feeling like they are doing all the work, etc. As time goes on, as long as expectations are laid out to the students and there is time to practice working in groups, creating jigsaw lessons, and playing games for a review game the students become more used to the routine. I want to continue doing this in the future and including even more group lessons and activities, technology, and jigsaw lessons. The last goal I have for myself is to make sure fairness and rapport are throughout the classroom. I want to create a safe space for each of my students. I want all my students to enter my classroom knowing they are cared about, I want them to be there, and that though everyone may not be the best of friends in the room they are respectful to each other. Creating this type of environment is something I am still working on. A lot of this semester was already laid out for me. My students had gone through these discussions and consequences with my cooperating teacher from the beginning of the year. I want to ensure the same for my classroom by laying out expectations, consequences, and rules from the beginning of the year and holding all classes and students equally accountable.

You know the saying “when it rains, it pours”…yes…that was my week. This post is meant to take a step back from the classroom and look into the realities of being a student teacher, a role model, a planner, a student at college, and did I mention a human? I’m human and humans get sick. When you’re student teaching you think you’re invincible and that because you’ve been around so any kids for the last year and a half that nothing can bring you down. I pushed myself for a week until I realized my body needs to rest otherwise I am not giving the kids my all and that is not fair and that is not a great teacher. Aside from hand sanitizer and over the counter medications being my top items in my purse each day to school, I still made sure I had the lessons prepared, sub plans prepared for if I couldn’t make it, and that I was still giving my all. Unfortunately, there just comes a time where your body reminds you that you still need to take care of yourself despite the craziness that happens around you: teaching, homework, lesson plans, meetings, personal life, and all things college. I finally had to take my first sick day, and it was needed. Getting an upper respiratory infection and strep really just are a terrible combination and a need to stay home. So, I stayed home and I did miss my students. I missed my routine and I knew that my cooperating teacher would (obviously) handle everything just fine, I just like being in the classroom and teaching the students!

I wake up Thursday, feeling better and ready to go to placement. I let me cooperating teacher and supervisor know that I will be in! I’m feeling good, antibiotics are working, I have an interview Friday I have to miss another day of placement for, but regardless I am ready for the day. On my way to placement, 10 minutes into the car ride I think “damn, I should have just stayed home”. Driving to placement I got struck by a driver who failed to stop at a stop sign completely and try to cut through 4 lanes of traffic. Well the car definitely cut through 2 lanes…and into my car. The worst part of it all? I was really excited to be teaching the day’s lesson. All I wanted was to rewind and either just have had a sick day or have had left 5 minutes earlier so this would not have happened. I panicked and after calling my parents I immediately called my cooperating teacher. Needles to say, I knew that my kids would know about this moment and I was okay with that. My coop came right to the accident and dealt with me and my car that was destroyed. She reminded me life still has its ups and downs.

Ms. P

Some wonder what a week looks like for me. Here’s an example of what a week from a full takeover looks like with all six sections of earth science and my 150 students:

On Monday and Tuesday I teach the same thing just to different sections and I had the students create a vocabulary exploration to words such as: telescope, reflecting telescope, refracting telescope, gravity, early astronomer, modern astronomer, KECK observatory, Ptolemaic Theory, and Copernican Revolution. The students folded two sheets of paper in order to have 8 squares and the point was on one side we took M/T where the students work independently and created their own definitions to these words. It was so great to see the kids create definitions on their own, without seeing the actual definition of pictures of the words. I wanted to see where the students were individually at and how deep their exposure to astronomy is. I loved watching the students go from “how can we do this we know nothing about it!” to “wait actually if I don’t know what a reflecting telescope is, I can break down the word and figure out it!” Their confidence was through the roof, and overall I was impressed with how well they did and how much they know (even if they were educated guesses). On Wednesday we reviewed the vocabulary terms and what the real definitions were. This allowed the students to compare their answers to the real answers and see how close or off they were and correct any mistakes/add to their definitions. On Thursday and Friday I had the students practice completing projects/presentations in groups. I want the classroom to be a student directed classroom where they are organizing information and collecting the information for answers they want to answer. I offered more guidance for this lesson as it was the first project they were completing in science. The students were in groups of 3-4 and were assigned an early or modern astronomer (Ptolemy, Copernicus, Brache, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Hubble) and were to create a poster presentation they will be presenting to the class on Monday/Tuesday. This allows the students to teach the class on their astronomer, as they are “experts” on their assigned astronomer. Each group was required to come up with a critical thinking question, which the class will be required to individually answer at the end of the presentation. This incorporated methods we have discussed in our methods courses from junior year. I allowed the students to decide how they wanted to organize the information on their presentation and asked they include the name, date of birth and death, whether he was an early or modern astronomer, what his biggest contribution was to science, 2-3 interesting facts, and a critical thinking question. The students collaborated in groups while I walked around and checked in on them, answered questions groups had, and overall was pleased and surprised with how well they did as this was their first time working in such large groups with me!

It seems chaotic, scary, and overwhelming at first. It took me a while to get so comfortable with being this flexible and interactive. Student teaching is totally the time to experiment with as many lessons, activities, units, and standards to get a feel for how you will want to implement things in your classroom.

Ms. P