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.