Classroom Reflection

My time spent in the Clinical setting, so far, has been extremely inciteful as to how to become a better educator in a classroom setting. Through the data I collected I was able to connect Borich’s Seven Variables of learning to the students. By being in the clinical setting for nearly two months, I have been exposed to new ways of thinking when it comes to structuring a classroom and instructing a classroom. Within this reflection you will find out how I would better plan an effective lesson for the pupils in my future classroom. You will also discover what I will do about certain issues in the classroom and how I will address/fix them.

Being Present 1. When I arrived to class I expected myself and my students to be fully present. If they were experiencing joy, sadness, a burden, I would have them share with the class before continuing on. This allowed my students to be focused on the now and not on what happened or will happen. An exercise that helped them accomplish this was to write something down that may be hindering them from being present and deposit it, without their name, into a classroom box. Temprarily, I was able to clear their mind and get them focused on what is happening now.

Before class even began, there I was, making predictions about how this group of students were going to act during class – it was clear from the beginning that they knew how they were to present themselves in that class. As the students came into the classroom, the teacher greeted them all individually, fist bumping some, inquiring about the personal lives of others. It was a very pleasant environment; the students were courteous to their teacher and upon getting to their seats immediately opened up their books to where they left off last class and started setting up their Chromebooks for their reading journals. The teacher then inspired this demeanor in other students by telling students who were trickling in at the last minute to follow the example of their classmates who already had everything out and ready to go. In addition to verbal responses to and reminders of positive behavior, she reinforced this behavior in her students through posters around the room that detail the behavior she and they should expect to see in the classroom.

In today’s society, it is important for educators to know the problems taking place in the classroom and outside the classroom. The two class readings encourage exploration of these ever changing ideas. Both novels complement each other in educating emerging teachers about these controversial topics. The key topics and main themes that reoccur in both texts are gender roles, stereotypes of teaching and lastly, race and racism.

Today was a very interesting day in Mrs. Beach’s classroom. When I arrived, Mrs. Beach asked about how my lesson went last week and began to explain what today was going to look like. Since today was the last day of school before Thanksgiving Break, Mrs. Beach was using the entire school day as a catch-up day. During my entire observation, the students were working on missing assignments. The teacher has a small whiteboard at the front of the classroom with a list of the recent assignments that have been done in class. If students had not completed or turned in these assignments, their number would be written under the title of the assignment, indicating that it was incomplete. Many of these assignments were very simple and were having students practice their math and writing fluency; however, all of the students were working on publishing their Turkey writings. Some students were still in the rough draft stage of the writing process, but the majority of the students were working on their publications. With that being said, it was pretty challenging to help students on these assignments since they mostly involved copying a story or quick recall; therefore, I spent about a hour and fifteen minutes of my time walking around and taking notes about the things that the students were working on. There were a few times where a student had a question and I was able to answer it, but for the most part, many of the students were independent.

In some aspects, the twenty minutes I spent microteaching felt like some of the most awkward twenty minutes of my life. In some of former other classes such as MAT223 (Intro to Secondary Mathematics Education) we had done assignments similar to this microteaching activity. I remember our group had the responsibility of teaching another form of proving Pythagorean Theorem. That was a beneficial activity because it gave us teachers in training the opportunity to get in front of the class and solidify a mathematical idea in front of "students". Unlike the MAT223 activity, the microteach activity is a more accurate and beneficial setting; at least that is how I felt while in front of the class.

One concept we discussed during class was the demographics of the school not aligning with the demographics of the teachers. A main point we talked about was how a lot of younger grades were taught mostly by white, female teachers. This negatively impacts students of color and their feelings surrounding school and forces an invisible tax on teachers of color working at underrepresented schools. In the school I did my field experience in, Chelsea Heights Elementary school, I noticed this point very clearly. Of all the staff I interacted with who taught at the school, five of them appeared to be white women, one was a woman of color, and two were white men. It was also interesting to note that the woman of color was a paraprofessional, and only interacted with one student at the end of the day. Both of the male teachers were specialist teachers, and taught physical education and science, which are stereotypically male subjects. In the group of homeroom teachers the class I observed interacted with, all three teachers were white and female. Compared to my field experience class, where over half of the students were students of color, this staff ratio was clearly disproportionate to the actual student population. By observing this information, I was able to actually visualize what we talked about in class, and see the population difference between teachers and students.

LP 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9 are evident in this teaching session.

There were many ways to monitor students' understanding and achievement of the mastery objectives during my lesson. Students were continuously informed me about their learning and interpreting information through discussions, explanations, ans written work. These informal observations provided me with opportunities for instruction to be adjusted according to students' needs.

While STEAM instruction relies on making authentic and engaging connections between the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics, the implementation can look slightly different from classroom to classroom. The first video demonstrates how a STEAM unit can be incorporated in a single content: middle school science. The video shows students working collaboratively in groups to complete the assigned lab and asking questions as needed. The teacher is seen facilitating the activity, as she moves from group to group, addressing those questions, providing suggestions, and guiding students towards the completion of the activity. Although neither the problem nor the driving question of the lesson were explicitly stated or reiterated during the observed clip, the ‘lesson essential question’ and the ‘learning target’ posted on the board communicate and reinforce the objective of this lesson (e.g. students will identify minerals and explain why minerals are important). Thus, based on this and my observations of the teacher and students’ interactions, I predict that this lesson is focused on assessing how well students can identify minerals, as a way to introduce students to the characteristics needed for identifying and classifying rocks. This skill is especially important as students need to solve the problem scenario, which involves describing different types of rocks to assemble a group of “rock” musicians. As I was analyzing the video clip using the

This paper will describe on why a certain lesson should be adapted before it is delivered to different audience at the same level. This lesson was taught to university students in the USA where the majority of the students were English native speakers. At some points in this lesson, the depth of discussion is not really appropriate to be taught to foreign/second language learners because the nature of English proficiency between English native speakers and foreign/second language learners is absolutely different. The finding in this paper will be based on observation of the writer and elaborated with the reference from library research.

My passion about teaching and my students motivated me to learn more about teaching. So, I really have to admit that I enjoyed this course a lot and I was so excited to take this course to know more about the teaching strategies used and the techniques of the classroom management.

When starting this class, I was a little concerned as I only have one class of my own this year and thought maybe I was taking the class at the wrong time. The more in depth we go in this class it is helping me more and more at my school because of the types of differentiation we are doing this year. I always thought I differentiated my lessons but through this class and my co-teaching experiences this year I’m learning that I have not differentiated enough. I have felt a pride in knowing that the music that I incorporate into student work time is beneficial. I also am glad to see that the use of pre and post assessments is important.

The desire to ascertain how the strategies, interventions and pedagogical that we learn in class are implemented by teachers in the course of teaching prekindergarten classes made me visit Mrs. Smith’s PreK 12 class. Before my visit, I had informed her of my intention to avoid ambushing her at the last minute. My visit to her class lasted for two hours, during which I remained nonpartisan regarding the activities that were taking place in the classroom. Before the class started, however, she introduced me to the class for the sake of making the children comfortable with my presence around them.

This lesson took place at Lawton Elementary, which sits in Oviedo, FL. The second grade class is predominately Caucasian with a few minorities. In the class, there are 11 girls and 7 boys. The class gets along with one another fairly well. I chose this lesson because the topic was aligned with the timeline of the school’s math book and framework. Furthermore, I wanted to try to add art into the math curriculum because there’s a misconception that the arts cannot be integrated into the math curriculum. I liked this lesson because it seemed like a fun way for students to become creative and to visualize a math symbol in a different way. I like that students can view something in multiple perspectives and views.