Fall Practicum Reflection Blog Post #3

During the past two weeks of practicum, I feel I have made improvements in my ongoing goals of more explicit modeling and more animated think-alouds. In the beginning I found myself becoming monotone or rigid for fear of straying from a somewhat scripted lesson plan. As I have become more comfortable with both the students and whole group instruction in general, I have found that fluidity and having a rapport with students during a lesson is more important to student understanding than making sure to read every line in the lesson plan as written. When modeling a task such as taking notes from a passage, I was originally so preoccupied with making sure every word in my example matched what was in the lesson plan that it detracted from the actual teaching. Now I am aware of simply remembering what the key understanding is that the students are supposed to get from me modeling and providing that in a more organic manner. In this way the modeling becomes more explicit and I can be more animated as I show students where I am getting the specific notes I am writing from and why I decided to write those down. In terms of student engagement, this is something I would like to continue to work on. For example, in one lesson I taught, I saw how something as simple as joking that the name of one of the tribes in the article sounded like one of the students’ names in the class got their attention.

Behavior management is another area that I would most like to see improvements in over the next few weeks. In the afternoon class, they had trouble behaving in line, so I introduced a point system in which students were placed into different color teams (red, green, blue, and purple) to earn points. Whichever team was best behaved in line would earn a point and the first team to ten points would get a prize. The idea was to not only encourage positive behavior, but also to encourage thinking as a team and recognizing one’s own personal responsibility to a group. In the beginning, it worked wonderfully. Students who were usually the worst behaved took on leadership roles in their team and the encouragement of exemplary teams was a more effective method of managing behaviors than calling out individual students who were misbehaving. The problems arose, however, when it became apparent that these behaviors were not translating into any other part of the day and the students were taking the points for granted. When coming into the room to line up for lunch, for example, the students were misbehaving before getting in line to put on their wristbands (used to demarcate teams). In the future I will need to remember to make the students sit down and do it again until they can do it properly, rather than simply urging them verbally to do what they are supposed to be doing. Most recently, the students were so poorly behaved on average that there was no group I could reward with any points. I have put the points system on hold until the students can show that they are capable of behaving better in line, at which point I might consider reintroducing it. In the meantime, however, it didn’t seem right to reward bad behavior.

Fall Practicum Reflection Blog Post #2

Since the feedback I received last week, I have been working on the three goals I mentioned at the end of my last blog post: pacing, explicit modeling, and more animated think-alouds. In terms of these goals, pacing is one area in which I feel I have markedly improved this week in two key ways.

One of those ways is through the use of a timer. Previously I had asked students how long they felt an activity would take them to complete and gave them an amount of time that reflected this. When I noticed the students would need more time after the amount of time I’d given them had passed, I would simply let them continue. Although I knew I was giving them more time, I did not make it clear to the students that they were now being given additional time. By using the timer with minutes and seconds remaining projected onto the board, students know how much time is left and hear a beep when that time is up. This improves pacing because everyone is more conscious of the time. When students are given more time, it is an exact amount. The timer also gave the students a sense of urgency in their work I had not seen before, as they looked up and saw their time remaining dwindling down. Using the timer not only helps my time management as a teacher, but it also helps students to develop their time management skills.

The other key way that my pacing has improved is through an important realization I had regarding how to allocate time within a lesson. Previously, there was a lesson during which I spent a good amount of time on vocabulary that seemed very important to me at the time. However, reflecting on this experience, I realized that the purpose of the lesson was not for students to learn this vocabulary, but rather to identify key supporting details and main idea in a text. By spending so much time on the vocabulary in the beginning, I ensured that either the main purpose of the lesson would be condensed into less time, or the lesson would have to run long. As a result I realized that one crucial aspect of pacing is remembering to only spend time on things that are essential to the specific purpose of a particular lesson. If something I am spending time on is not going to meaningfully move students towards accomplishing the specified objective of the lesson, then pacing will suffer and it is not a good use of time.

Moving forward, a question that was raised in some of the feedback I received was, “How can you make sure students are accountable for work during partner tasks?” In other words, using an example from a lesson I previously taught, did the students really understand what they were writing in their graphic organizers? During the lesson I found I had to conference with lots of students to support them in completing the task, and several students were simply copying sentences from each other or the text without understanding. First of all, this issue can partially be addressed through achieving one of my aforementioned goals: explicit modeling. If I am more explicit in my modeling and carefully thinking aloud to show how I arrived at my answers, students will be more likely to understand how a task is done instead of simply seeing what the finished product should look like. Another issue to be addressed here, however, has to do with differentiation. The lessons I have been teaching these past two weeks were LDC lessons. While these are carefully planned out and accomplish integration of science and language arts, they do not take into account the diverse range of reading levels in the classroom. The passages used in the lessons were so above the reading levels of some of the students that even if they understood the purpose of the task, the reading level of the passage made the task almost impossible. This led to some students simply copying sentences from the passage without really understanding what they were writing or why. In terms of planning lessons, this highlights the importance of differentiating tasks for your students so that all of them have an equal chance of succeeding. One way to do this would be to use centers, in which groups are created based on reading level. This way, for a given task such as identifying main idea, different passages of appropriate complexity may be used with each group. All students may be filling out the same graphic organizer, but they will be doing so with different passages. One of the centers would be guided by the teacher. Students in most need of support would begin at this center, where the teacher could guide them through the task from the beginning. More advanced students may end at this center with the teacher, where the teacher can check in and conference with them to see how they did.