Practicum Experience Analysis 1
After analyzing my blog, I have found that most of my strategies I implemented boiled down to my need to have more of a classroom community. Going in to this program, I knew this was one of my weakest points as a teacher, so I am thankful to have had the opportunity to evaluate myself and make changes for the better.
In regards to my attitude as a teacher, I feel I am extremely optimistic, yet still grounded. I set lofty goals for myself, but I believe they are actually achievable. I'm a naturally introspective person, so as a teacher I find myself constantly evaluating myself, my students, and my classroom, because I want to learn, grow, and change things so they become better. My positive attitude doesn't seem to help my students feel all that motivated to work to their best ability, but I do see that they trust me, respect me, and value what we're doing in class, even if they can't get themselves to finish their homework. I actually had a few of my EL students stop me before class and ask why I was always so happy. I explained to them that I love my job, and I love working with students. This is a real-world example of what I think my blog shows: that I care, I learn, I grow, and I keep a positive attitude the whole time.
When I think about my process to analyze my teaching, one thing I find I consider much more than I used to, is Social Emotional Learning. I've had a real change of mindset in my teaching this year. I used to think of SEL as something that was separate or apart from my curriculum. I used to think SEL was reserved for side-lessons when I had extra time (which rarely happened) because I didn't understand what SEL really was. Now, sometimes I feel like SEL is a guiding force for some of my lessons. I can see that it's made an impact with my 9th graders because I've incorporated more metacognition related to SEL to try to teach them the importance of learning how to do school. Specifically, I feel I am good at making real-world connections between the art of "doing school" and how to be successful past graduation. My 10th graders have loved my openness in relation to incorporating movement and performance in the classroom. My students seem less stressed, we've made more connections with each other in the past month than we have all year, but I haven't sacrificed content. In fact, because I've incorporated SEL and performance in to my classroom, my students are actually more informed about the content and are pushing their learning deeper than I would have gone if I was approaching the curriculum from a more traditional point of view.
I want to continue incorporating more unconventional learning experiences into my classroom. I want to move away from a traditional structure of lecture, take notes, do an activity. Because of my more concrete-sequential brain, I sometimes struggle with letting go of control - I want things to be done in a very "Step 1, Step 2, Step 3" fashion, but since I've been enrolled in this program I've experimented with things like throwing an activity at students first and then introducing the topic. I did this recently with my 9th graders. Instead of doing my traditional structure that's very step-by-step and controlled, I decided to put together an activity that pressed more conversation and discovery to introduce the key concepts of the unit. In previous years, I've just told students the goals and started lecturing, but this year was different and I can tell that my students were more engaged and know more about the topic than in previous years. It's like I'm celebrating what students are walking in to the classroom already knowing instead of assuming they know nothing. My students are more talkative, they're making more connections, and they're learning more than my past groups of 9th graders.
SMART GOALS
I will improve classroom community by incorporating movement and performance-based learning all classes; I will utilize backwards design to evaluate and reconstruct 2 units in each course to achieve this goal.
I will personalize learning in LA 9 by developing station activities to review and teach story elements; this personalized learning will be assessed using a post-test to measure students' growth in comprehending story elements.
In regards to my attitude as a teacher, I feel I am extremely optimistic, yet still grounded. I set lofty goals for myself, but I believe they are actually achievable. I'm a naturally introspective person, so as a teacher I find myself constantly evaluating myself, my students, and my classroom, because I want to learn, grow, and change things so they become better. My positive attitude doesn't seem to help my students feel all that motivated to work to their best ability, but I do see that they trust me, respect me, and value what we're doing in class, even if they can't get themselves to finish their homework. I actually had a few of my EL students stop me before class and ask why I was always so happy. I explained to them that I love my job, and I love working with students. This is a real-world example of what I think my blog shows: that I care, I learn, I grow, and I keep a positive attitude the whole time.
When I think about my process to analyze my teaching, one thing I find I consider much more than I used to, is Social Emotional Learning. I've had a real change of mindset in my teaching this year. I used to think of SEL as something that was separate or apart from my curriculum. I used to think SEL was reserved for side-lessons when I had extra time (which rarely happened) because I didn't understand what SEL really was. Now, sometimes I feel like SEL is a guiding force for some of my lessons. I can see that it's made an impact with my 9th graders because I've incorporated more metacognition related to SEL to try to teach them the importance of learning how to do school. Specifically, I feel I am good at making real-world connections between the art of "doing school" and how to be successful past graduation. My 10th graders have loved my openness in relation to incorporating movement and performance in the classroom. My students seem less stressed, we've made more connections with each other in the past month than we have all year, but I haven't sacrificed content. In fact, because I've incorporated SEL and performance in to my classroom, my students are actually more informed about the content and are pushing their learning deeper than I would have gone if I was approaching the curriculum from a more traditional point of view.
I want to continue incorporating more unconventional learning experiences into my classroom. I want to move away from a traditional structure of lecture, take notes, do an activity. Because of my more concrete-sequential brain, I sometimes struggle with letting go of control - I want things to be done in a very "Step 1, Step 2, Step 3" fashion, but since I've been enrolled in this program I've experimented with things like throwing an activity at students first and then introducing the topic. I did this recently with my 9th graders. Instead of doing my traditional structure that's very step-by-step and controlled, I decided to put together an activity that pressed more conversation and discovery to introduce the key concepts of the unit. In previous years, I've just told students the goals and started lecturing, but this year was different and I can tell that my students were more engaged and know more about the topic than in previous years. It's like I'm celebrating what students are walking in to the classroom already knowing instead of assuming they know nothing. My students are more talkative, they're making more connections, and they're learning more than my past groups of 9th graders.
SMART GOALS
I will improve classroom community by incorporating movement and performance-based learning all classes; I will utilize backwards design to evaluate and reconstruct 2 units in each course to achieve this goal.
- I want to set this goal because I'm finding success in my classes that I've experimented using more performance as learning, so I'd like to expand this into all of my classes.
I will personalize learning in LA 9 by developing station activities to review and teach story elements; this personalized learning will be assessed using a post-test to measure students' growth in comprehending story elements.
- LA 9 is important to me because it's a class where I feel I have true, direct influence over the future success of my students. They are brand new to the school, they struggle with the work load, and they give up on themselves easily. I feel if I make the learning more personalized that they may develop a stronger connection to the course, the students, and the material which will hopefully lead them to becoming stronger, more confident students who can manage their tasks without extreme frustration.
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