Week 3 September 3-7

I have slowly started to take over more and more responsibility in my classroom. I am now fully in charge of my mentor teacher’s English class. I am so excited to teach these kids! Not only do I love English, but they are also a really great group of kids who work hard. I have also started teaching the skills group station in the Read 180 class. This class includes a full group lesson for 20 minutes, and then 3 rotations of computer, silent reading, and skills group each for 20 minutes. With this type of schedule, I teach the same lesson 3 times and I have noticed over the past few days of teaching this class that I become more confident and comfortable by the third rotation. This shows me how great it will be down the road when I am teaching the same thing year after year. I am able to reflect on how the lesson went in between rotations and hopefully change a few things before the next rotation.  However, I feel bad for the first group of students because I feel like I don’t provide them with a good enough lesson compared to the middle and last group. Is this the case? How can I change things throughout the lesson in order to benefit all students?

After one of my lessons this week, my mentor teacher discussed some things she noticed. She had a ton of good things to say but she also gave me some suggestions. I love getting feedback from my mentor teachers because they are the professionals and are helping me become a professional myself. She told me during some of the lessons I need to try to move quicker, specifically during skills group. She noticed this with the first rotation group and said the pace greatly increased as the groups rotated through, as I became more fluid with what I wanted to teach them.  She said that I ask a lot of questions, which can be a good thing, but she suggested I try to form some of my questions into commands. Instead of asking who would like to read a passage, I could say, “(student’s name) please read the passage.” I tried to use some of these suggestions the next day when I taught and she said she noticed a definite change and I seemed more confident. I can say that each day that goes by I am becoming more and more relaxed with my classes. I know I have an issue with moving quickly through lessons because I am so used to primary students and working at a day care over the summer, that I want to make sure each and every child is aware of what is going on, but sometimes you must move on in order to get through material. The students are old enough by now to know that they need to be paying attention and it is there responsibility to ask questions and get help if they need it. Timing of lessons and keeping them moving will be some thing I work on as the weeks progress.

Next week I am fully in charge of the English and Read 180 class! I have developed my lessons and am very excited to get started. With the Read 180 class, since it is a special program, I can’t really deviate from the material, but my mentor teacher told me I can switch things up as I come to them if I would like to! She is awesome about sharing her class with me and really encouraging me. She has really great ideas so most of the time I have been using her lessons and adding some of my own things. Next week I will also start taking over one of the math classes. We have one regular class and a collaborative class. The collaborative class makes me kind of nervous because I just want to be able to reach all the students. With the collaborative teacher’s help, I can move towards this goal. It is still sad to see students struggle so much. Each Friday my mentor teacher and the math collaborative teacher plan together. I really like this because they are able to talk about what they can do to help the students in their class. Today they decided to take the SPED teacher’s case load to a separate place in the classroom to help them complete a 5 minute check. They also took a few other students in order to mix it up and not make it so obvious that only certain students were getting pulled away. This really helped because they were able to go over the material even slower and it helped the other students in the class because they could move at a faster-pace as well.