Observation and week 6

In this week's news PSSA testing at Lamberton continues and we began a unit on the play The Diary of Anne Frank and we started a vocabulary unit. The week was an odd one, at times it felt very fast and at others very slow. I feel like one thing that improved for me this week was my class engagement. I've been trying very hard to achieve the same type of engagement that I had in my last placement. It was easy for me to get students to talk at the high school placement but for some reason I was having a hard time with it at LMS. With the start of the new unit I've been able to actively engage kids relying on their prior knowledge and asking questions trying to extend what they know. I hope that the rest of the unit continues to go well. I have a lot of grading and work to do in the next week and a half. Unfortunately with all of the extra stuff in this placement (ie: placement testing, field trips, movies, etc)my first unit took a lot longer than I'd hoped. Now I'm teaching the vocab unit and The Diary of Anne Frank unit simultaneously. Though it means I'll stress a little and sleep for a week when after graduation I'm glad to keep going and have time to teach and continue to get to know my students.

The big thing for this blog is my observation. I had my final observation today and Dr. Mortimore came to observe my 3rd section class. While the lesson itself went well, the main issue was with classroom management. For my lesson I consolidated some vocab that we've been working on and then transitioned to a KWL on Anne Frank, a slideshow of the Frank family and the other people who hid with them, and assigned parts for the play on Monday. Today the students were pretty unruly. There was a lot of talking, side conversations, people who forgot just about anything and everything, and just a general lack of focus. I believe that contributing factors to the rowdiness were the fact that it was A. Friday, B. afternoon, and C. a PSSA testing day. That being said, I definitely did not do some of the things I should have. I had to tell students several times to be quiet and get focused. Looking back I should have used wait time a little more instead of telling them to get quiet, separated some people (possibly) or asked students who were constantly being disruptive to leave. Something that Dr. Mortimore suggested was to assign silent work if talking becomes too much of a problem. Another thing we discussed was to have the students do some silent work right at the beginning of class to quiet them down right away. I think these will be things that I will consider implementing for the future. In this placement they won't work so well for the next few weeks but they are both techniques that I'd be interested to use in my own classroom. The next class that I had after Dr. Mortimore left worked very well. It's amazing how different those students were from the first period class. Even though I had days this week and last week with much better management I know it's something that is a constant challenge to teachers and something we've all worked on this semester. I'm glad that Dr. Mortimore got a chance to see this class because I didn't have management problems in my first placement. I can take the information from my co-op and now from Dr. Mortimore and hopefully have great classroom management for my last week and a half.

Good luck to everyone with their last week and a half, portfolios, and impact projects. Enjoy the last few days.

Countdown: 2.5 weeks....yikes

Hello all! After our dinner on Wednesday night my week got progressively better. I got over my issues and I'm really excited about finishing these last few weeks strong. I feel like I have a good handle on my new unit (The Diary of Anne Frank...the play) and I'm really excited about starting it. I haven't felt this excited since I was at my placement so I think that's a good sign even though I wish it would have happened earlier. My biggest challenge with the unit I just finishd is that I had trouble getting students involved and as a result it bored them and it didn't really let us get to know each other. I should have tried to create activities where my students were actively engaged and while I wanted them too be sometimes I thought they were but looking back they weren't. This is something that I took into consideration when I planned my new unit and I tried to create more opportunities for engagement. Also, I'm trying to work on my classroom management. Some days are better than others and I'm trying to use more direct, firm statements and calling out individual students who are causing problems.

Not much happened this week, PSSA tests took up a lot of our time (as I'm sure they did for most of you) and I had to plan my time around those. The same thing will happen next week but I think that my literature unit will be easier for me to teach around testing than my writing unit. I attended Lamberton's faculty meeting on Tuesday which I liked because it was pretty short and sweet. The principal got right to the point of what he wanted to say and we got through the agenda pretty quickly. This is a lot different than the faculty meeting I wanted to at Ship (although we read an article for that one that brought up a lot of discussion). My placements have been very different and as I've bene thinking about it in regards to jobs I agree with what Jenna said on Wednesday. A lot of the way you feel about the school is the environment. While I think that I like high school better, I'd definitely be willing to give middle school a shot in my own classroom.

For the last few weeks I'm setting some goals for myself:
1. Get students more engaged
2. Develop better classroom management

Good luck in the last few weeks. We're almost there.

MLA, Washington D.C., and Dances With Wolves Too

Hello fellow student teachers! I want to start by saying congratulations to all of us because we officially have 3 and a half weeks left until we're done with student teaching and we become Shippensburg graduates! I hope everyone has a good last few weeks and makes it through PSSA's in one piece (yayyy).

Now on to my week. I did write a post about my observation on Wednesday but I'd like to start by revisiting Tuesday. On Tuesday I did a lesson with my students on MLA and works cited. I believe that my students understood but my co-op recommended that when I'm using guided notes that I should really engage the students more and to find a way to create a good activating strategy. On Wednesday I did a lesson on thesis statements and I tried to incorporate more discussion throughout the guided notes and both my co-op and I thought that I did a better job than the day before. He still suggested that I work on my activating strategy but he provided me with some examples of ones he uses and I think that will help as I move forward. Wednesday's 4th period was also one of my hardest classroom mangagement days. I was using an article that talked about getting off of school for holidays of minority religions such as Islam and Judaism. It was specific to their district and in fact had been written by a student from a few years ago. The first three classes were not a problem so I didn't expect 4th period to be a problem either but they got into a more hotly contested debate about the issue which made it hard for them to focus on what I was teaching them. I didn't want to make any student feel like their opinion was't important and I really hope that they didn't feel this way. Afterward Mr. G and I talked about setting specific guidelines for discussions like those. 8th grade is a tough age to teach. They have a lot of energy, questions, emotions, and some of them are offended very easily. I hate to think that I could accidentally make anyone feel bad.

Thursday was my field trip with the students. We went to Washington D.C. and took a group of 8 students (along with my co-op and a parent chaparone) around the monuments and the Smithsonian. Overall it went well and the students seemed to have a good time. The ride home was very loud but it was an interested experience. I'm officially scared for more field trips though.... On Friday we watched Dances With Wolves as part of something for history class. All in all it was a pretty low key week.

While I was considering all the feedback that I recieved this week, and feeling a little overwhelmed at points, I came to the realization that there aren't many other professions that require their professionals to take as much feedback as we do. I enjoy recieving feedback so I can improve my teaching but sometimes I have to tell myself to not get upset because it can be very heavy. I think that this week felt a little overwhelming and as it gets down to the end all of this is coming up. I hope that I can always take the feedback and turn it into something positive and improve my teaching.

On an uplifting note to a very long post, I'd like to leave you all with a quote for our last few weeks, "So be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O'Shea, you're off to great places! Today is your day!Your mountain is waiting. So get on your way!"

Observation 3

Today I had my third observation and I believe that overall it went pretty well. I was happy with the content of my lesson (which was on thesis statements) and the handout I created. I created a series of rules for the students to use when creating a thesis statement. I incorporated the use of the smartboard into my lesson and wrote the answers the fill in the blank statements on it.
My lesson started with an example article from a few years ago. We read it aloud as a class and then briefly discussed it. In addition to asking students if they agreed or disagreed with it, I also asked them to identify the topic, the position of the writer, and the thesis statement. We did this orally in whole group. Then we progressed to filling out the worksheet. I had students volunteer answers if they knew them and we went over examples at the end. The remaining class time was spent in the computer lab working on their persuasive letter to the editor.
After talking with Dr. Mortimore and my co-op I identified a few things to work on. One of those is to try and involve more students even if it is just in a pair share so that each student is held accountable for the information and to increase participation. Also, I've been having problems including good activating strategies. I believe that I thought of the article as an interest generating piece but as my co-op pointed out, the students didn't know why they were reading it until after we were done. By using a more specific activator, I would be able to give them a point to it before we start. This is something I'm going to work on for the new few weeks. One other thing that was suggested was to give students more examples and more opportunity to practice their own. The students need to see what thesis statements look like so giving them more examples (and lots of them) would have helped them to see several different ones. In terms of writing their own, this would give them good practice for their letters. Since most people learn by doing this would have been a better use of some of our class time than just reviewing the answers verbally. I think by incorporating these things into my upcoming lesson it will make the classroom a better, more engaging place. I look forward to my final observation, I can't believe it's almost here. Field trip tomorrow...wish me luck!