My Reflection On My Experience In A Classroom

My feet hit hard on the cold cement steps as I slightly jogged up to Armstrong hall. I stepped into the old building and saw my classroom right away. No one was in the hall and all I heard was the air conditioner blowing. I entered the room at 20 minutes to six there was only one kid sitting in the back of the room. The room was tiny and plastered white without one pop of color in it. I take a seat in the middle of the desks as they were all facing the front wall that had a huge whiteboard on it. I reached down into my backpack and pulled out a notebook and pencil. As I looked back up more students are starting to fill the room, and the professor walked in. I watched as people walked past me to go sit somewhere else and wondered who it would be that would sit in the empty cold chair next to me. I heard a laptop slammed onto the counter and I looked over at the professor. He had anger written all over his face as he struggled to hook up his laptop. I was expecting him to ask a student if anyone was good with technology and could help him. He did not speak up to ask one of us and he just sat there struggling till he finally gave up.

I also realized that I needed to read more into classroom management. I noticed the teacher had withitness since she could conduct a reading group while watching and listening to the other 5 stations of students scattered across the room. She was able to read the book out loud to the class while noticing the students’ behavior such as a child who had put a rock in her mouth. The teacher calmly stopped reading and told the girl to spit the rock out and throw it away while exclaiming that rocks are not intended for our mouths or eating. Then she began to read again. I did not even see the rock from where I was

This movie, The Classroom, which was very interesting to watch, discusses all that goes on in the school system, the good and the bad. But it also shows how things at home can affect the way the student acts during the school day. This movie definitely makes you look at students that act out differently, instead of punishing them maybe we should all look deeper into the issue and find a way for the student to thrive and use school as an outlet.

Last semester was exceptionally challenging; however, it was extremely beneficial because I had to work harder than any of my other classes before. I think various elements contributed to me being unsuccessful in Nursing 204. My aunt died in March with Lupus and that affected me in a huge on the grounds that she played a big role in my life, since I was a child. I was still in the denial stage and my emotions took over, which caused me to become less motivated in school. I just felt like I had no inspiration last semester and I should not have let my emotions hindered my education. In high school, I generally experienced difficulty taking tests that were not seeking the direct answers, and the Nursing 204 tests were not quite the same as the tests I would regularly take. My procrastination last semester played an enormous role in failing the course. When I initially

Most of my direct experience working with curriculum is as an public elementary school teacher. I prided myself for many years in aligning the state curriculum frameworks and objectives with the instruction going on in my classroom, and received praise from administrators for sticking to the “playbook”. As time went on, though, I realized that my mixed ability classes were simply not performing up to my personal expectations. I began to create flexible groups for math and language arts, and differentiate instruction based on group needs and student interests. I saw significant improvements in student engagement, behavior and overall achievement.

This Learning By Design (LBD) plan has been written for a Year 5 Class consisting of twenty-seven (27) students, fourteen (14) boys and thirteen (13) girls. The student body consists of several Year 5 prefects. Perfects are voted in students that take care of students in other younger grades and set good examples for them. This class of students is based on student data in the learning area of English. The data places students into five (5) different ability groups based on their English skills, knowledge and understandings. The focus of this assessment is structured on the learning area English based on vocabulary, decoding/word attack, fluency, comprehension of fiction/non-fiction (or informational) texts and spelling.

Teaching is not just a job that I perform because I expect a reward at the end of each month; it is my passion and I feel extremely satisfied with every successful lesson. I like to help the society, and teaching gives me a great opportunity to do so. I am passionate about educating my students, so I work with them and motivate them to lead them to find inspiration in learning. I use different strategies to engage them and share with them the knowledge.

The entire chapter of best practices has no shortage of information and ideas for up and coming teachers and gives ideas of how to achieve certain goals in a classroom. I almost wish I could just list all of the concepts that I want to use in my own classroom for when I start my first year of teaching. But I get to pick three I want to talk about in greater detail and two concepts which I really want to use in my own classroom. Some of the concepts that were talked about that I would still like to keep in mind, even if I don’t find them to be in my top three are; the layers of classroom management, setting up different workgroups, leaving comments on student’s papers, and different practices to make writing meaningful. This being said I want to keep these in the back of my mind so they are prepared as I get closer to becoming a teacher. The three main concepts for me are; having a daily routine, noise and structured chaos, and having pen-pals.

I am teaching at McClure Middle School under the direction of Ms. Michele Crull. I am in a sixth grade social studies classroom where they are learning geography, government/civics, economics and history of five specific world regions. My collaborating teacher has a spectrum of students ranging from special education to on level children. She does not teach any gifted or advanced classes, but has 3 inclusion classes. Some of her students require more attention and guiding through their work, so Mrs. Carter comes into her classroom to aid these students in addition to Ms. Crull. Thus far my experience in the field is getting off to a rocky start, but things are slowly improving.

It was very sad to end my time at Adams. I had a really amazing time getting to know the kids and seeing what it was like in a classroom on a daily basis. The students were also sad to see it come to an end. They were use to having me come into their classroom and be another teacher for them. In the last two weeks the students started to do another reading assessment. To do this, they would sit down with the teacher and read out loud to her, pointing at each word as they read. This was to see if they were making the connection of the words that they were saying and the words that they were reading. The students have been taking home reading books over the last month and she was seeing if the students’ reading was improving. She was also evaluating if students needed to continue at the same level that they are currently on, or if they were ready to move up to the next level.

This school year I had the opportunity to be in the internship class. I interned at Lexington Middle School in the media center. I interned under Ms. Shoaf who is the media coordinator. This was not an easy internship. It wasn’t a really welcoming feeling my first few days. It was more of a one day she likes me and then the next she doesn’t. It was extremely difficult to work with. I feel like this had a lot with the ways I fell short. It took so long to actually start feeling comfortable going to my internship and being there around other students and the teachers. This was one of the worst aspects of the experience because it was very difficult to get the teachers to actually take me serious. When I first had to go around and help in the media center I received a lot of “who are you?” and “what are you doing here?” questions. But being the optimistic person I am I planned on making the most of it no matter what. This comes in to what new skills I learned. I learned how to have patience with students and more even with the teachers/adults working there. This is because rarely will you find a naturally nice teacher (in my experience) and one who isn’t forgetful (having patience was very important when reminding them to do the same thing at least 3 times). I learned a lot about communication skills and gained a whole lot of them too. This being because I usually had to go around to classrooms and talk to the teachers or pass out things.

Before taking becoming a teacher I had volunteered in my community at home. I was always helping at the care facility that my great grandfather was staying in. Although this was a different kind of service than I did for my ACE hours I was still making an impact on someone in my community. I would help with the senior citizens, serving them lunch, playing games, and interacting with them. They loved when me and my little brother would come to help because it wasn’t just like any other day, we would take them outside to see the birds or take them to the movie room to watch a movie and have popcorn. I feel like with my ACE hours I made an impact on the young children in the community because I went and helped out in a sixth-grade science classroom. I went on a regular class day and a “lab” day. On lab day I got to be very interactive with the students. I really liked that I chose this service for my ACE hours since I want to be a teacher, it gave me real insight of what a class day looks like from a teacher position not as the student. The students knew that I am a Sam Houston State university student and they were very interested to know what college was like and what I was going to be “when I grew up”. They wanted to talk to me the whole class period about it, so we spent a couple minutes talking and then got to work.

During the first day of class, I usually start by introducing myself to my students then, of course, I invite them to do the same. I am particularly interested in knowing their names, hobbies and what difficulties they encounter in learning English. I listen carefully to each presentation. My diagnostic does not only aim at evaluating the students' linguistic skills, but it also focuses on their personality. Knowing that some students are naturally reluctant at first, I have the habit of handing out a questionnaire asking each student to provide a written response to a few questions that might be uncomfortable to answer in public: parents' occupations, previous grades, career goals and finally anything else they would like me to know.

Personal experience is something that happen to you. It can be good or bad , or can help you in your future. My personal experience is when I found out I wasn’t graduating with my class. That day showed me that I shouldn’t have been playing around I had ever thing but my English 4 credit and passing the FCAT test. After trying so many times I just give up. I felt like I didn’t belong here and school wasn’t meant for me. I hate the fact I didn’t get to graduate with my class. I wasn’t really upset just disappointed that I didn’t take school serious.

One of the most important things about being a teacher is knowing your strengths, and how to use them to your advantage. Finding personal successes are crucial to discovering who you are as an educator. So many of my proudest moments have occurred in the past two years, and all of them have taught me valuable lessons that I am so lucky to have as a future teacher.