week 6

This week I've noticed that I am starting to feel more comfortable with my lessons. I am not as nervous as I was before. I definitely feel like I need more practice, but I feel I've made some progress. My host teacher mentioned that it has taken her years to master the skills she has. That helped me feel more at ease. I guess I was feeling like I had to fix my teaching strategies overnight when I was getting feedback, but I'm realizing that I have to take baby steps and make small, but effective changes. And I guess this is what this whole experience is about.

This past week I also had my first observation and I got to personally meet my supervisor, Mrs. N. I must admit that when she was there I felt really nervous. However, after we had the opportunity to speak I felt much more at ease. She was very supportive and understanding. She has a wealth of knowledge and I am lucky to be learning from her.  In the short amount of time that we talked I felt like I learned so much from her. She gave me a ton of advice that I already started to work on. My goal for this week is to provide more student engagement and model turn and talk. 

The day after my supervisor came to visit I taught another read aloud lesson. I tried to ask more questions and provide more opportunities for my students to converse with one another, which lead to a great teaching moment. There was a particular student who was sitting at the front of the carpet she raised her had to share her thoughts, and at first, she was looking at me, but then I noticed that she kept turning her head slightly like she wanted to face her peers, so I quickly encouraged her to turn around and look at her peers and I encouraged the other students to respectfully look at her. I pointed to the reading together rules and I told them that we wanted our friend to feel respected when she spoke. They all looked at her and were engaged! And then some of them wanted to respond to what she had said. I could tell she felt really special and the rest of the students felt really amazed that they were all engaging in a what seemed like an “adult” conversation led by them! I had such a proud teaching moment. 

My goals for this week:

• Provide more student engagement during read alouds
• Model turn and talk
• Provide jobs for students who are fidgety at the carpet (e.g. book holder)
• Provide questions that lead to deep thinking and activate schema 

Classroom Confidential

I read chapter 9 Great Teachers Are Drama Queens for this assignment.

I really enjoyed this chapter it reminded me of a video I recently watched when researching ways to make my edTPA lessons more engaging for students. The link to the video is below https://www.teachingchannel.org/video/academic-choice-lesson 

The teacher in the video was teaching a lesson on sequencing and she gave the students an opportunity for them to decide how THEY wanted to show what they had learned. I was so impressed! I thought, how empowered must the students have felt at such a young age to be able to have that type of autonomy in their academic experience. It was definitely a learning experience for me. 

I agree with Schmidt, there are many benefits of including the arts in your curriculum. In addition, I believe including arts in higher education could be just as beneficial. Everyone can relate to art, drama, movement, and music regardless of age. I think back to my own childhood experiences as a student and I think I have been the most academically successful when I was allowed artistic freedom. I was definitely more motivated to learn what I was going to be presenting to my peers. I think it's human nature to have the desire to self-express and I think school's should embrace that desire and provide more opportunities and outlets for students to do so in a safe environment.