Back At It!

Back at it again! I was warmly greeted by the secretaries, by name, on my first day back which a pleasant surprise. Everyone is being very supportive and helpful.  I attended a staff meeting on Thursday where myself and Andrew were re-introduced to the staff and were invited, along with the seven other student teachers, to partake in a lunch next week as an icebreaker. I also had the opportunity to check in with my Principle and Vice Principle and discuss the possibility of one or both of them observing my teaching and they were extremely willing.  My school is going above and beyond to make me feel comfortable. At least three teachers approached me asking if I needed resources or invited me to observe their classes, including staff from the highschool. There is predominantly a great community around me at the school.

            To get my 20% immersion, I planned with my mentor to do reading assessments on all of my students. I only got through 37 of them as it was a very busy week but it has been incredibly helpful to understand where the students are at in their reading. The biggest surprises I found were the students who got close to 100% on their reading but were very poor at critically thinking about what happened in the story. In every one of these cases, these students are classified as “good students” or “A” students but it is interesting how weak they are at deeper level thinking. On the other end of the spectrum, I had a student who was not as strong of a reader as I had thought and got a low score for her reading but was making amazing connections to the story. When I showed this data to my mentor she was equally surprised which has made me recognize the importance of teaching my students to ask ‘why’ and look closer into their reading.

            The other teaching I did this week was to take on the Health and Career class and finish up a short unit on Cyber-bullying. The students were engaged and provided great discussion for the various scenarios we discussed. I also introduced some of my classroom management strategies by having students think about the goals they want to accomplish by the end of the year. We then did a variety of strategies to narrow down these goals into rules we will abide by in the classroom. I thought that the exercise went really well. The surprises that came out of it were that once the rules were formed, some students did not agree that they were the most important. All three of my classes felt that the most important goal to have was to get straight A’s. I then lead a discussion about how straight A’s are not achievable for all students and that it is more important that they try their best and do their best work. It took some time but most of the students came to this realization. I recognize that this may be hard as the school that I am placed in is a very academic school so grades are on everyone’s minds…especially the parents. As it is part of my teaching philosophy, I intend to teach my students to recognize their potential and work their hardest to achieve to that level.

            Overall, I am happy with how the first week went. I am stressed and excited to start next week, as I will be going right to 80-100% for the next six weeks. In preparation I stayed late and did a ton of photocopying and changed up the look of the classroom. I took down a lot of posters that my mentor had up in anticipation of hanging student work as well as I changed the layout of the desks. I am now looking forward to spending the long weekend writing detailed lesson plans for the week and completing my units.