Week 16- Teaching Practice

Week 16

In the last week, I had an review days for both subjects I teach as well as test days for both as well. For my Algebra II and Algebra I students, I created Jeopardy PowerPoints for my students that were related to their test content. This was a long process, but my students found it very fun for Algebra II. As for Algebra I, many of them liked it, but it was a big step to take and some of them handled it well. Others did not try problems or were totally off-task. 

This review day showed something that I am continuing to struggle with and that is classroom management. This is something that is difficult for me because I am a new teacher and I am young. Furthermore, I find this process of classroom management difficult because many standard level students do not care about their grades at all and the grading policy for BCPS allows them to skate by since attendance, participation, and behavior do not affect their grades anymore. This grading policy has caused issues for even veteran teachers, so I know that I am not the only one struggling with students who complete no work and disrupt class on a regular basis. 

I found the review game to be successful in general and I felt it helped students get ready for the test. I felt that many students who normally are not involved got involved in most classes. My one class had only 5 of the 15 students completing the problems, so I stopped the review and gave them book work for the entire class after that. I have grown tired of students who are lazy and it does not stop. As a teacher, I feel like I am doing everything within my ability to make the class fun for them, but it does not matter. 

Week 15- Teaching Practice

Week 15 

In the last week, I worked on classroom management with little improvement. I started with rearranging seats of students and continuing progressive discipline with phone calls and referrals. This has worked about half of the time, half of the parents discipline their children, the other half do not or the children do not care what their parents say or do. In addition, I chose table leaders for each group and said that it was their responsibility to get their table quiet when I was asking my students to regroup after a discussion or problem time. This was successful for the most part. I also used a countdown method as well to get students back on track. 

As for my Honors students, I worked on being less helpful for these students and I worked on inquiring them more about the math processes. I found this effective in getting a better picture of what my students understood. I also had a very successful day of reviewing with my students using a PowerPoint with the game Jeopardy. My students loved it. Each table created a team name and the two tables with the most points got candy. This review included everything that my students could expect to see on their exam next week and many of my students showed a need to review more on factoring. I have noticed that many students seem comfortable with quadratics and their transformations as well as drawing other functions like radicals and cubics.

This past week was overall much better, but many students continue to bring in bad behavior and no work ethic into the classroom and their grades display this. It is disheartening and sad. 

Week 14- Teaching Practice

Week 14

In the past week, I found my students as hectic as ever, which worried me, but I also had several students who have started to mature and realize that getting good grades is important. This has been a pleasant surprise and so great to see. These students are now taking notes, asking questions, completing their work, and doing well on assignments because of it. The disciplinary issues continue for now, and the past three weeks I have really hit hard on students with phone calls home, referrals, after school detention, and so on. Hopefully, this will lead to a mutual understanding about classroom expectations. I have talked about the expectations multiple times and many students still lack the discipline to follow these simple rules. 

On a more positive note, I FINALLY used my Promethean Smart Board on Friday, and the lesson went so well! My students were comparing linear relationships when they were presented in different forms. For instance, they would get an equation for one situation and a table for another situation and be asked to compare them and answer questions about them. I invited students to come up to the board and write on there. This allowed students to get more involved and I had students engaged who previously would have never gone up to the board all because of the cool technology and the different colors. 

All in all, this week could have been much worse. My fourth period Algebra 1 class did very well Thursday and I rewarded them with Jolly Ranchers. They were all involved, asking good questions and most of them got a 100% on their exit ticket. This class has struggled so it was a bright spot in my week to see them all do so well.

Week 13- Teaching Practice

Week 13

Last week, I worked with my students to review material in preparation for an upcoming test that covers our first unit, linear functions. Many students decided not to complete any work. As this is already one-third of the way through the school year, I am tired of asking students to simply give effort to try problems. After asking students anywhere from 3-5 times, I simply wrote down their names and started writing referrals because I find it unbelievable to have students not doing work. I understand that my students are freshman and still maturing, but asking them to simply work on problems and review in a fun atmosphere with the prize of candy and bragging rights in class should not be that difficult. I wrote 4 referrals for one class with 30 students in it. I am frustrated and saddened by the students who do no work. I feel that this grading policy is very liberal and allows students to be lazy and complete the bare minimum amount of work and "skate" by from class to class with a D average and push students through high school. 

The "high school" diploma that these students are receiving is a joke. These students are de-valuing their high school degree because they are doing no work and not trying to learn. This is leading to employers not having enough highly qualified workers, which forces them to require applicants to have a college degree now and students want to complain that they cannot get a job without a high school degree. It all starts with the high schools and students actually working towards their futures. When students complete no work, schools simply do whatever they must to push students through so they can get their federal funding. This is why I feel the grading policy has changed and I do not like these changes in respect to my standard level students because they see the "Lowest Score" when they do no work and get a 50% as them doing alright. So if a student simply does a little bit of work, they can sneak by from class to class with a D or C average having learned very little. 

These students then get into college and fail out in their first or second semester and cannot graduate because they did not learn what they were suppose to in high school. As a new teacher, the lack of effort from many of my students is disheartening because my students have no idea how lucky they are to live in a state like Maryland with a great education system and be born in the United States, compared to people in other countries who cannot get a free education or even get 2 or 3 meals a day, fighting just to stay alive. Meanwhile my students sit on their iPhone and complete no work, having no idea what it is going to do to their opportunities in the future. 

Week 12- Teaching Practice

Week 12- Teaching Practice

In preparation for this week's assignments on creating my teaching philosophy, I spent a lot of time thinking about the way that I want to teach my students and connect with them. During my Post Observation with my Master's Mentor, Mary Carol, she continued to return to three main questions to consider when creating a lesson. First, What do you want your students to learn? Next, How are you going to get the students to learn the material? Finally, How are you going to assess that your students understood the material? While these questions are so short and simple, they can be very effective at identifying how you can plan a lesson. For my students, I continue to ask myself these questions everyday when I am planning. I also find myself double checking my lessons to make sure the lesson makes sense and is logical. I found somewhere online where a teacher would start with her assessment and go through her lesson backwards in order to see if the material flowed well. Going backwards made her slow down and helps her identify issues within her lessons. I am going to be trying this next week to see if it is helpful. 

Last week, my one Algebra 1 class is very large and the students are very loud and all attempts to quiet them down have failed. Calling home, referrals, rewards systems for being on task and quiet have all failed. I find the new grading policy difficult because classwork is no longer a grade as well as attendance and behavior. My troubling students are freshmen in high school, so many of them are immature, but the behaviors they are displaying are more a sign of disrespect to me than a sign of immaturity. As a new teacher, it is very hard to have students cussing on a regular basis and behaving in the manner that they are. It is testing my patience and growing  more and more difficult to handle. 

Week 11- Teaching Practice

Week 11

In the last week, I spent a fair amount of my time thinking about the things I needed to do in order to improve upon my teaching craft based on the feedback I received during my first Formal Observation in order to prepare for my second Formal Observation on Friday. I have been focusing on my pacing the most because I had struggled to get through lessons because activities took longer than originally planned or we get off topic for a few minutes and we are unable to complete exit tickets . Furthermore, I wanted to work on improving my cold calling as well as getting more students involved through every problem to evaluate understanding more often. 

One way that I worked to improve my pacing was to use a timer for everything that my students do. From their warm-up to their group work, I would give them five minutes to try the problem. If groups were struggling, then I could extend the time by a minute or two if necessary. Adding a time limit forces students to continue to push forward without any down time until they are finished. Another thing that I did for cold calling was create a post it note that had the number for each table of desks and would put a tally after calling a student from each table in order to reach each table without leaving any table felt left out of a lesson. 

I found the post it note helpful as a way to keep myself from calling on any person or table too often. Furthermore, I felt as though my ability to stop the group activity when many groups had the same mistake was good because it allowed me to address misconceptions that many people had. 

All in all, my lesson went very well. When I was finished, I felt like a rockstar and knew that I had done a great job with the lesson. I was so confident that every time I had something to do ask a question, stop the class, or give feedback I felt my level of confidence grow as well as the amount of fun I was having as well. My students learned the material and my administration could see that. The feedback I got was extremely exciting with them suggesting to continue to build upon this with me working less and the students working harder, having more fun and presence, and continuing to ask good questions. 

Week 10- Teaching Practice

Week 10

In this last week, I found myself really revamped into my lesson planning and my practice of teaching. I am not sure exactly what it was, but I felt it was something like a runner's high. Once you break running for the first mile or two, and then it starts to feel amazing. That is what happened for me this past week. I found my some of my most troublesome students start to behave appropriately and in one case, be the most involved and knowledgeable student in the class that day. 

This all started with increasing the number of phone calls and e-mails home to parents and guardians. As a teacher, I hate the idea of having to call home and report on students bad behavior because it takes time from my day, but I know that it is necessary and for the most part it has been success in allowing parents to understand that their child needs to be reminded how to behave or they will face consequences at home as well as at school. These phone calls were very productive for parents and for me and almost all of the parents were grateful for the call and wanted to be informed in the future if anything was going on. I have found so far that many parents want to be involved in their child's education, but are busy with other things such as multiple jobs or school or something else and just need that assistance from the teacher every once in a while to rededicate themselves to their child's educational career. 

This week, also found me getting great feedback from other teachers at my school, specifically my school's STAT teacher, who is a heavily visual learning who was happy to see my improvements in my PowerPoints with larger font, use of colors and pictures to draw student's attention to the material. Furthermore, I found my Algebra 2 students do very well with the process of completing the square by providing them with step by step instructions on how to do it. 

As a math person, the steps in math seemed simple to me, but I have found that for students who struggle, giving them a guideline of steps to follow allows them to be more successful. I am planning to continue with step by step processes in all of my math classes whenever it is applicable.