Week 3

Enjoyable.  Overwhelming.

I believe my goals were to circulate around the room more and to try to enjoy what I'm teaching.  I feel that it's easier to enjoy what I'm teaching when I'm familiar and comfortable with my lesson plans.  I'm still not there yet, but I enjoy watching my cooperating teacher and seeing how she interacts with her class.  I hope I get to that point someday.  I have tried to be conscious of my need to stay at the center of the room, and I've been experimenting with walking around the room when I talk.  I use it more right now to monitor behavior when students are talking.  So far, I think I've improved but more work needs to be done.

My goal for this week is survival.  And to give myself a break.  I have a lot of planning to do since it's my first week as a full time teacher.  I am very hard on myself, and after my observation on Friday, I have a lot of doubts.  The one word I would use to describe the week is enjoyable, but after Friday and seeing my workload I would choose the word overwhelming.  My cooperating teacher even gave me pretty simple goals to work with for Reading and Writing times, which will help me.  But I think I'm freaking out because this is all just a new environment for me.  I miss what I'm familar with, and that's working with kids with disabilities.  I like this environment as well, the kids are such sweethearts, but I just don't know where I'm going to be going after this experience.  I have a lot more questions than answers now, and wasn't expecting this.

With regard to Julie's classroom management, she is very consistent with her methods and consequences.  I would hope to continue the consistency. I'm not sure of something I plan to do differently.  I would want to make more use of several different kinds of positive behavior supports.  I feel like I've been focusing on the negative at times, and hate that I sound like a broken record.  I think then, one of my goals should be to focus on rewarding students who are behaving how I want them to while a lesson is going on.

I plan to start my class effectively by informing students of procedures in my classroom, and the expectations we collectively have for behavior. I've had several opportunities to implement classroom management.  I think to the reading lessons I've taught, and when students made connections to their lives from the text, I would tell them,  I like how you are thinking hard about the text, and I would tell them to put a ticket in the basket (it's a positive reinforcer for the whole class).  I think I would try to have multiple ticket-worthy questions worked into my lesson so I could reward several students and they would be motivated to dig deeper when they read. 

"Effective teachers MANAGE their classrooms.  Ineffective teachers DISCIPLINE their classrooms."  An effective manager of a classroom is able to let everyone be and there are expectations that are set up that will provide for rewards as well as for consequences.  Ineffective teachers discipline their classrooms and their focus is most likely on the negative and punishment.  Positivity and rewarding kids for their good behavior will bring about a more positive result, as opposed to making students feel resentful.

Something I need help on is knowing what the specifications are for the 3-5 minute video for our portfolio.. Can it just be a few clips patched together and then uploaded to YouTube?  I know that I can then just post a link to my portfolio.  Also, the video for the TPA, I'm wondering if it's just that 15 minute teaching clip and can that be in a youtube link or does it need to be copied to a cd?  That's about it for now.