online reflection #1

I have been in my cooperating teachers’ classrooms for three days and the nervousness and anxiety has worn off finally.  My cooperating teachers have been quite helpful.  In fact, the Language Arts teacher just started teaching three years ago, so he remembers his experiences as a pre-student teacher and has expressed many times that he wants me to have a great experience and to be comfortable in his classroom.  While the cooperating history teacher was asked to be part of the program at the last minute in order to help with scheduling difficulties, I believe I can learn a lot from watching his teaching style.  He has a great rapport with the students and fantastic classroom management skills. The administration and staff are very friendly and helpful as well.

As many of my colleagues know, I have a difficult time remembering names.  As we know from our reading and from our experiences in the classroom, knowing students’ names is very important.  So, my first task or goal is to know the names of the students.  My Language Arts teacher, I’ll call him Mr. LA, shared an activity with me that he does with all his classes on the first day.  He has the students stand in a large circle and they take turns introducing themselves and repeating the other students’ names along with an adjective, adverb or verb that start with the same letter of their name.  For example, Mr. LA models by saying, “Loud LA”, the next person would repeat all the names before and do the action with it (if there is one) and would then introduce themselves, such as, “Running Randy”.  My cooperating teacher said with all the repetition, he knows all of his students’ names in just one day.  I think this is a great activity for middle school students on the first day and I plan to use this in my classroom.  But, for now, I have been using the students’ independent reading time to study the seating chart and have learned almost all of their names.  Mr. LA has provided me with everything I need to be successful, including some IEP’s for students in this CWC.  There are about six students who need additional literacy support and for that reason, there is a para in this classroom also.  I will call him Mr. Para. (I know…not very original…but I feel this will help understand their roles without having to refer back to other paragraphs or entries!)

I believe that there will be a few challenges in this classroom.  First, since this is a Title I school on improvement, the Language Arts curriculum must follow the America’s Choice program.  Mr. LA said that he feels that it has it’s good and bad points; however, he believes that he should follow it even when other teachers do not.  He said that the challenge is to find time for additional, more creative, learning activities that are less boring than the designed curriculum.  I can see how this will be a great challenge after looking at the America’s Choice lesson plans.  It will be difficult because there is very little freedom given to teachers; but, I will do the best I can to add short activities for each class period that I teach.  Secondly, there are a handful of students who are easily distracted.  They require a lot of prompting to get them back on task; although, with three adults in the classroom, this is not too problematic.  And finally, there are two students, who are not on IEP’s, who seem disconnected and extremely uninterested in writing or class discussions. Therefore, one of my goals is to find a way to connect with them, to make the lessons relevant and interesting. Perhaps they will be susceptive to a more kinesthetic approach.  My cooperating teacher believes they are having problems at home and that may be difficult to counteract.

The Social Studies classroom will be challenging for me simply because the cooperating teacher’s style is very different from my style.  I am more of an observer in this classroom; therefore, it will be challenging for me to connect with the students.  I have a seating chart and have tried to learn the students’ names; however, the classroom arrangement does not allow space in front of the students for more than one person.  So, I sit at the back of the classroom while Mr. History lectures and have very little time to walk around and interact with students.  I hope that as time goes on, I will be more active in the classroom.  For now, I am learning from Mr. History’s classroom management skills and his use of the Smartboard.  In addition, he has created a friendly yet competitive atmosphere, in which, students are compelled to give input during whole class discussions.  The structure of his class seems to be the same every day….students review their notes from the previous day, whole class discussion and lecture, then the closing, which entails a discussion about what they will discuss the next day.  On a promising note, Mr. History has given me the freedom to choose a topic to teach and to use any structure that I desire to teach my lessons.