Margaret Rule-Blog 1: Week of 9/12
This internship year is critical in terms of developing my professional identity as a teacher. The internship is an important opportunity to get as close as I can to being a teacher without holding complete responsibility, but I am still anticipating needing to manage school, classroom, and student dilemmas on my own throughout the year. In relation to developing my professional identity, I am concerned about not fully committing my personal goals as a person and teacher in defense to my school's expectations and my mentor teacher's expectations. I understand that sometimes I will have to hold back on instructional strategies and techniques because it is not my classroom, and my ways may not match up with my mentor teacher. I want to avoid discrepancies with students and their parents regarding my actions in the classroom. Therefore, communication with my mentor is important and we should discuss what is expected of us as the teachers and what is expected of the students. This way, we can prevent dilemmas with instruction and student comprehension.
In relation to constructing relevant curriculum, I anticipate composing common assessments for social studies and science with higher level thinking. What happens if a lesson simply goes all wrong? Either my instruction wasn't clear for the students, the lesson was too difficult, or I loose the attention of my group and the students don't learn the objective of the lesson. And lastly, in relation to assessing students in meaningful and productive ways, I anticipate finding time to do the assessments within the day. I also anticipate lessons that simply go wrong. Either my instruction wasn't clear for the students, the lesson is too difficult, or I loose the attention of my group and the students don't learn the objective of the lesson. Lastly, completing all the units of study before the end of the year.
I feel confident in planning and assessing. Although I have not spent a great amount of time inside the classroom, I already know of the resources within the school to properly create unit lesson plans. And before the school year started, the interns and new teachers attended a professional development opportunity about a new reading assessment. We are using the Fountas and Pinnel Assessment System. It is a great program that allows teachers to construct accurate assessments of our students' reading levels and comprehension. I do hope to learn more about teaching. I am nervous about classroom management and behavior, especially working with first graders. It is a challenge to keep students interacted and keep them from talking aloud when ever they want to.
Given what I know so far about my classroom context, there are opportunities for me that will help me learn more. My classroom has great diversity within the students, speaking in culture terms and in their independent levels of learning. So using the new assessment, we will be able to see where all students stand. Depending on those scores, my mentor teacher and I will discuss the idea to 'finesse' or 'hybridize' our literacy practices.
Given what I know so far about my classroom context, there are opportunities for me that will help me learn more. My classroom has great diversity within the students, speaking in culture terms and in their independent levels of learning. So using the new assessment, we will be able to see where all students stand. Depending on those scores, my mentor teacher and I will discuss the idea to 'finesse' or 'hybridize' our literacy practices.
Reading through Meg’s post I find that I feel similarly with a lot of what Meg feels her strengths and weaknesses are. I too am very excited for this internship in order to establish my professional identity as a teacher. While I have been in the classroom before I felt like I was always more of a helper or assistant. This year I am finally more of a teacher and I find it so exciting. Something that I worry about within my professional identity is my ability to manage everything that I have going on and the organization of it all. I want to be prepared and ready for everything for my sake, my mentor teacher’s sake and my teacher’s sake but I currently feel a bit scattered and I worry that this is something that I will struggle with this year. Like Meg I am working towards having a very open communication with my mentor teacher because I want the classroom to run smoothly for the students. I am always watching and listening to what my teacher is saying so that I am not causing dilemmas within her classroom. However, I am trying to maintain my own personal identity within the classroom. I feel that this is another challenging thing because I do not want to be exactly like her but I also do not want there to be any confusion for the students.
ReplyDeleteThis year I am excited to really work with the students but I am also nervous because I worry that I do not know enough different teaching methods for the students when they get confused on curriculum. I want it all to be relevant to them and I feel that the more I observe the better I will become at learning new ways to teach my students. Like Meg I want to push my students to use higher-level thinking but I also want every student to succeed and since they are all at different levels I think this will be a challenge for my teaching. I would never want one of my students to feel discouraged and so I will need to make sure that I give clear instructions and make the lesson something that every student will feel pushes them to their zone of proximal development. This challenge, however, is one that I must overcome this year because I want to be able to say at the end of this year that I did everything I could for my students.
In reading Meg's and Alexa's post I could not agree more with almost everything that they have said. I am very excited for this year and like Alexa said I am excited to be more than a helper. I am not sure if it is just my role change or a change in confidence, but this year I am seeing a huge change in myself in terms of my assistance and teaching in the classroom. Meg mentioned the worry of stepping on the teacher's toes and I have thought about this idea as well. I think that we shouldn't worry about making suggestions and giving our feedback to the teacher's because not only do we then get feedback from them on that approach, but we also have the chance to see to possibly see it implemented. I believe it's all in the way you approach it to your teacher. However Alexa mentioned the idea of "maintaining our personal identities" which I thought was really cool. I think this idea really channels how we should place ourselves in the classroom. We should see ourselves as professional educators and bring out our own identities through it. I believe that you need to be yourself in order to learn because the first thing you need is to know yourself and how you will display that in your actions. Once you have figured that out you then can discover more capabilities and learn new ideas to better yourself. I believe that to discover our professional identities we need to be open. I believe that may be difficult because again we may see an idea our mentor teacher or district has as not correct. I know my district keeps trying to standardize many aspects of our curriculum and it's making it harder on us as teachers since my Mentor Teacher has many ideas already in place. Personally, I want to continue to work on my professional identity with maintaining my stress level. I tend to get stressed out over little things when I should look at the big picture. I need to put things in perspective of what is the most important.
ReplyDeleteA dilemma I see in terms of developing teacher and student relationships is the fact that in my classroom I have many teachers in and out. There is my mentor teacher, myself, a Wayne State Student, and a mom that comes in and helps. Many of the students in my classroom also have other teachers that they see for other help. All of these faces may start to blend and they might not see me as unique and may not get as close to me. If I am blending with our teachers I will not be able to gain a sincere relationship with that student where I can know them personally to help them in areas, such as relation to personal experiences in comprehension.
I agree with Meg's comment that sometimes things might just go wrong and therefore we need to be ready in terms of our curriculum and be willing to accept this. We are still learning and as much as we may think that our lesson is the greatest it might just not have worked for some students. This is why I believe that getting to know students and assessing/ monitoring the students in the first couple weeks of school is so important. I am anticipating dilemmas across curriculum with the new programs versus the old programs and trying to plan an in between. For example, the new reading and math programs move at a fast pace and many of the children are going to need much assistance and mini lessons to be able to grasp these concepts. I believe this may be difficult for me to blend all the programs to fit their needs and also constructing mini lessons to compensate for information they don't know. I believe my biggest dilemma with assessment will be not only finding the time in our busy schedule, but also being able to assess them correctly. I believe students need to be assessed individually or in small groups so that they can take their time and also it is less distracting. This may be hard with many students and our schedule.
I feel pretty confident in my planning and teaching large general lessons, but am not as confident in teaching tier groups or thinking of the right activities to work on skills certain groups of students need. For example, some of the early skills to learn to read new words. I know there are many types of strategies, but I am not confident in trying to explain them to the children. I feel very confident in the assessments because I have been familiar with many different types of formal assessment and also I feel confident in informal assessment and making sure to put these types of assessments throughout my lessons. I have been doing a math and sight word assessment with my children this week and I am feeling good about it. I agree with Meg that I am worried about some management techniques, but I believe that I am learning daily by watching my mentor teacher handle that child later on that day or the next day.
ReplyDeleteSo far I believe that there will be many opportunities for learning this year. I am really enjoying my experience and am learning a lot already. My teacher is not only allowing me to observe, but participate in all her lessons. She has showed me all the different testing and allowing me to track the scores and how to do write ups to show what a child knows and doesn't. I am learning not only how to assess, but how to evaluate the assessment to be able to help the child improve. I believe I will learn a lot because of all the varying levels in the students across different subjects and also watching two different levels of students interact. In terms of finessing and hybridizing my literacy practices I think that we need to continue to assess the reading levels of the students as Meg said to be able to understand their background knowledge. As a class we have begun to work on some skills such as comprehension in terms of a initial understanding. I want to continue this and move it more from guided practice skills to collaborative and independent levels. I believe the big push for our class this year in terms of literacy will be for the students to be able to work on it and show you that they can do it independently.
Great insight and reflection for the first week ladies. I'm impressed!
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