Looking back, looking forward...

        Last semester, when I began to think about my student teaching experience, I was so apprehensive. As January approached my nervousness and apprehension turned to excitement. I was excited about experiencing what my lifelong profession had in store for me. I couldn’t wait to dive in and to learn about all that the teaching field encompassed. Little did I know, I was about to begin an amazing journey that has prepared and taught me more than I could ever have imagined. To me student teaching became something I looked forward to and wanted to do with excitement. Student teaching became not just a learning experience, but the key to open the passion within myself to teach children and enable them to succeed in their goals.

        I have learned a great deal over the past four months. It is amazing to look back and reflect on the way I taught and all the aspects that I “thought” I knew about teaching before my student teaching experience. When U think about all I have learned and experienced in the past four months it creates even greater excitement about what I will experience and learn in the coming years I have as an educator.

        When I began preparing my own lessons and deciding what to teach and how to teach it, I was a bit overwhelmed, but as the weeks went on I became much more comfortable and realized that if one of my lessons did not work the way I planned, that it was perfectly alright. In fact it was a learning experience for me, just like it was for the students. Only, I was learning how to teach the material and they were learning the actual material. As I got to know the students, their learning styles, their strengths and weaknesses, their motivation, and their behavior, it became much easier for me to create lessons and keep the individual students in mind while also encompassing the material I needed to teach them and keep it interesting, on their individual levels, and creative. After I began to see the aspects, it changed my instruction for the better. For example, in the beginning, when I was teaching in the fourth grade, I used a lot of material from the Social Studies book because it was something I was not comfortable with, but, as time went on I began to be more comfortable and began to use KWL’s and Venn Diagrams to help explain the material instead of giving students work from the book. Also, after learning the students’ learning levels and their interests, I began differentiate my instruction. We began to do many activities such as group posters advertising the cotton gin. This activity was very interesting because depending on the students’ learning abilities I was able to give three separate assignments depending on levels to the separate groups of students. Using these groups, I also divided the students into groups based on their behaviors with one another. This helped greatly with behavior management. I also used these same guidelines and ideas in a science unit that I taught on motion and force. The students were given different experiments and different questions or closing assignments based on their learning levels and their behavior with other students.

        I also used the same ideas in Kindergarten the second half of the semester. I used the idea of differentiating students after learning and became aware of their different levels, behavior tendencies, and their interests. I used the ideas in a Math lesson I taught using animal crackers to sort, add, and introduce the idea of graphing. The students were divided into different groups based on levels with a mix of high, middle, and low students in each group, and also based on their behavior with one another.This idea of differentiation I used in both fourth grade and Kindergarten was hard to learn and even more difficult to sit down, think about, plan, and actually implement, but once I began doing it, it seemed like second nature and I saw the results in the students learning and their behavior.

        Using and learning to differentiate changed not only the way that I instruct, assess, manage, and use different learning strategies, but they also change the way I look at each of these different ideas. I am now more comfortable with planning instruction and assessment to fit each individual student and by doing this I am able to incorporate more useful strategies and management systems to give students learning opportunities to their best abilities. When I think back about what I knew about differentiation and how uncomfortable it made me in the beginning of my student teaching, it makes me smile. Experiencing what I have, learning what I have, and seeing the actual positive results of differentiation I now see the huge importance it has in the classroom. I am happy to say that I have changed the way I view student learning and based on the different learning styles of each individual student, the way I instruct, assess, manage, and use strategies has greatly changed for the better. Although, I am no expert, I am comfortable with the opportunities that differentiation gives and I am even more comfortable with the openness I feel to try new strategies and the excitement I have about giving each individual student the opportunity to learn all they can through my planning and instruction for each of them.

         Reflecting, I find two competencies that I feel are very string areas for me. Although I realize, I still have much learning to do and am open to all of this learning, I feel that I have learned a great deal and shown great strength in these areas. I feel that I am very strong in the area of Reflective Practitioner and Critical Thinker.

          In the area of Reflective Practitioner I am very strong because I tend to over analyze everything. I find myself always looking for answers to unsolved questions and wanting to know the exact reasons something happened for the positive reasons and the negative reasons. After many of the lessons I taught, I found myself sitting down jotting down ideas or making notes to myself, and I also found myself questioning my cooperating teacher about her feelings and ideas regarding my lessons both instruction and creativity. While teaching a Penguin unit in the fourth grade, I found myself constantly reflecting on ways to make students more involved in actually learning about penguins. We read “Mr. Popper’s Penguins” and were also doing other activities to learn about the penguins such as worksheets, but I realized that the students needed more. After reflecting by myself and then with my cooperating teacher, we decided to have the students replce worksheets and “busy work” with actual research and a PowerPoint assignment. At first, I was overwhelmed myself, but the students loved it. I divided the students into groups of four based on levels and behavior and we brought laptops in for the students to research and create PowerPoints. I created a rubric for the PowerPoints and the students took the project and ran. After it was all over and the students presented their PowerPoints, I sat down and reflected again by myself and then with my cooperating teacher. I will definitely use the idea again, whether it is with penguins or some other unit, but there are a number of things I would use again and also a number of ideas I would change. The main reason I see myself very string as a Reflective Practitioner is because just as I showed how I changed this unit constantly based on my reflections I feel that I did this throughout the semester. I have come to realize that nothing will always go the way it is planned and teaching in general is not stable. I must be flexible, creative, and open to new ideas. This is why I believe that I am strong in the area of Reflective Practitioner.

          I also believe that I am very strong in the area of being a Critical Thinker. There were many times in both fourth grade and in Kindergarten where I found myself connecting ideas of the real-world to the lesson I was teaching. I realized just how much this worked n helping the students create knowledge and understanding of the subjects and also understand how the subjects were useful not just in school, but in life. This was great in fourth grade, but especially in Kindergarten because there is so much emphasis put on growing up and learning to be independent. I found myself each day during calendar time relating the days to specific ideas or even telling simple stories about certain days. Another way I used critical thinking strategies in Kindergarten was through having them make predictions about certain books. For example, I taught a fairy tale unit and each day we talked about what made up a fairy tale and we would compare each of the books we had read. After doing this, we would always discuss and predict about the next fairy tale that I would read to them. They loved this time and did a great job of coming up with predictions and reasons to support their predictions.  I feel that the area of Critical Thinker greatly impacts my instruction, assessment, and management. I am able to think about how to make each of the areas more useful and more student friendly while maintaining the idea that students must be open to knew ideas and the world around them. If I am a Critical Thinker, it is easier to convey the ideas and instruction that I want my students to receive and understand, as well as, be able to think in higher level ways about these ideas.

         Along with having strengths, I also feel I have areas of weakness, or areas that I could use improvement. These areas are Pedagogical Expert and Student Enabler. I feel that I worked to improve both of these areas and did improve them a great deal throughout the semester, but I also feel that when I have my own classroom, these two areas will be greatly concentrated on for improvement.

         As a Pedagogical Expert, I feel I am strong in all of the areas except for designing assessments and using them to inform instruction. I began to use KWL’s in both fourth grade and in Kindergarten to help me to make sure that my assessments aligned with the lessons that I taught, but I feel that I could still use improvement. I believe I feel uncomfortable with this because it is an idea that has to be suited for each lesson and more or less in a little inflexible when it comes to what is being taught. My lessons changed so much from what I actually had planned to do in both fourth grade and Kindergarten, and the quick changes from day to day without early notice made it hard to make sure that everything aligned appropriately. Although I know that the students are always changing, just as the lessons and timelines, I realize that it is important for me to make sure that everything is aligned so I can monitor exactly what my students are learning and what I need to change about my own instruction to better accommodate all of the students. So, I intend to work on this aspect of my teaching through using more pretests and also smaller mini- assessments throughout the lessons and units to make sure that my students are learning what they need to and that my instruction is working the way that it should, and that is to allow each and every student the opportunity to learn to the best of their ability.

          In the area of Student Enabler, I feel I was string in the area of differentiation, but as far as appropriate positive reinforcement and assessment feedback, I feel I could use improvement. The whole idea with assessment feedback is along the lines of the ideas I mentioned earlier with Pedagogical Expert. In order to strengthen this area, I plan to make sure that I monitor the progress of all of my students more closely so that they will be more accommodate and have better feedback after pretest, mini assessments during units and lessons, and also posttests. An idea that I have recently reflected on is making an actual chart and graphing the students’ progress form the beginning to the end of different lessons, units, etc. I believe that through this I will be able to improve my assessment feedback and create more meaningful and useful help and learning environments for my students in the future.

          After looking back over the semester, I am so excited and am looking forward to encompassing everything I have learned about instruction, assessment, behavior, and teaching in general in my own classroom. Being a teacher is a lifelong dream of mine, a dream that is finally here waiting to take off. As I take into consideration all the reflections I have made about how to teach and all the experiences I have had about how to communicate and impact the lives of students positively both academically and socially, I am ecstatic about starting my new profession. Students are the future, and as I leave my years as a students, I am excited to think that I am about to be apart of the future, both in the lives of my students and also as a student becoming part of the future.