Reflections

My student teaching experience has been really positive. I have enjoyed working in the school system and have had a really wonderful site teacher. I really lucked out in terms of getting a really experienced and organized site teacher. She has taught me all about how to create lesson plans, manage the classroom and make the best use of my time. She is open to new experiences and willing to listen to my thoughts and ideas and we have worked really well together. She arranged to have me teach a lesson for the school Principle (like I will once I get a job) and although I was very nervous I think that it was an important step to take to help me be more comfortable teaching on my own. I have also taught with other teachers and parents in the room. I have practiced going up on stage at awards ceremonies and have been involved in all areas of student learning while I have been at my site school.

My Impact learning project was  really fun but also very challenging. I learned several valuable things over the course as I taught my lessons. There are several things that I would modify if I were to re-teach these lessons again. First I would be less timid with my behavior management from the very start of my lessons. My lack of firm discipline in the beginning of the lessons led to wasted instructional time. I also would allot a solid block of time for these lessons. I could have moved the word study lessons into the smaller blocks of time to keep the science lesson fluid. I think that keeping the lesson fluid and being more firm with discipline may have kept the lesson shorter in overall time by cutting down on the talking the time it took for transitions.

 I also would have started the lesson with the preferential treatment of the LLI (Leveled Literacy Intervention) students. I started this after my first lesson and they may have gotten even more out of the unit if I had started it sooner. In the future I will also track down more technology for any science lessons that I do. Now that I know that there is a lack of technology. I will also find an alternate way to do my science experiment. For the experiment we created saltwater and then left it outside to change to freshwater. It needed to be aided by the sun and we had to wait several days due to poor weather to complete it. I need to have a back-up plan next time in case of poor weather. I sent lesson materials down to the staff lounge to be copied (as is school policy) and I didn’t get my entire lessons packets correctly copied. A few were missing pages. The next time that I teach I will be more careful about checking the packets. I had extra copies of each paper so it wasn’t a huge deal, but I could have saved time and confusion by double checking each one.

Overall the lessons were a success, but more extensive planning on my part could have improved all the areas of my lessons. I will spend more time planning in the future to try and ensure that I have thought of all possible scenarios (hopefully). I enjoyed teaching and was grateful that I had a very organized and involved site teacher. My site teacher was huge help and I learned a lot about organization and planning from her. I will be using all of the tips that she taught me in the future.