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.