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. 

Week 9- Teaching Practice

Week 9

In the past week, I had to go through my first end of a grading period which was less than ideal. I had students coming in everyday during every lunch break and after school period to turn in redo assignments for work. One day, I had over twenty students in line to ask about a redo or turn in material to me. Many students were very impatient and got loud. For those loud students, I gave them a warning and said if they continued to talk, then I would kick them out and they would not be able to redo any assignments. As for the impatience of my students I have told all of my classes now in detail that if students continued to monitor their grade regularly and redo every assignment throughout the quarter, then they would not have to wait in a long line to make up assignments at the last minute. 

I highly doubt that my mentioning of this fact will change the minds of the majority of my students, but I thought it was worth a shot to mention it. I also found that my students who come to me regularly for help on either homework or redo assignments were not the people who needed to redo work during the last week. I also told my students that most weeks I have either three or less students at coach class any given day and most days, no students come in for help. I have continued to instill the idea that the homework is important to emphasize the extra practice to learn how to do something and get feedback, but many of students still do not understand that. 

I find the grading policy difficult to teach within because it allows students to be lazy and not do work and their parents then wonder why their student is failing in class because they do not get enough practice of material in the 90 minutes of class, especially if they are off-task as well. This grading policy gives students a 50% for any assignment even if they do not attempt the work. The idea behind this is great, but so far in practice, my standard level students have taken this great mastery learning grading policy and decided to do less work. 

Module 8- Teaching Practice

Module 8

In the past week, I had several informal observations including one by one of my administrators and he gave me good feedback on ways to continue to hone my craft of teaching. He stressed that I find ways to make the material relevant to my students. I did this in my lesson by talking about the cost of colleges and ways that my students could save money will still furthering their education. I continued from this by having my students work through an example about Yellow Stone National Park and the wolf population. This real life example of the struggling wolf population shows how math can be applied in the real world and how I can draw my students interest in mathematics for future careers. 

What inspired me towards mathematics was all of the different ways that mathematics can be used. For instance, economics, healthcare, investments, sports, engineering, and many others. I love that math has so many applications and I am portraying that to my students everyday because I can relate math to whatever interests them in order for them to feel invested and interested. As my students continue to relay their interests to me, I will continue to find new ways to speak to them about math and other subjects that interest them. In addition, I have found that small games can peak students interest. I have started playing Hang man when I am searching for a certain word when describing new material and all of my students get involved, even those who do not know the answer. It has been effective and exciting. 

Module 7- Teaching Practice

Module 7

Last week, I spent a lot of time within my lesson planning with my department chair working to make my lessons more organized for my students in order to prevent opportunities where students can have the chance to talk and get off task. I did this by chunking my lessons in better ways by having my students take notes for approximately 10 minutes and then try some example problems for 5 minutes, followed by more notes and practice problems, which then lead into a slightly longer activity with a discussion of sequences. I found this to be successful and my students liked it because the note taking was broken up into smaller parts. By doing this, my students were able to get more active work within groups as well as more discussion time in class which is my goal. I want my students to be exploring mathematics on their own for the most part rather than me simply teaching them how to do it. I want students to create these connections between the material and their prior knowledge. 

Additionally, I found that my algebra 2 students prefer working in groups to learn rather than in competitive settings individually. I found this to be interesting because many times individuals like competition, but my class was more interested in working in groups competitively, so I have decided to make the majority of practice work as competitive group work. My algebra 2 students also have struggled to make connections between parabolas and quadratic functions. We had an activity where students would plot points on their calculator where the radius of a paper circle was measured and then the weight of the circle was measured, and then the values were put into a table. The radius was the x-value and the weight was the y-value and this relationship is quadratic in nature. The overarching question for my students was, "if the radius of a disk is double, does the weight double as well? " Many of my students initially told me that yes, it must, but then found out they were wrong. I showed my students the relationship in a slightly different way by showing them the formula for the area of a circle, A=Pi(r^2) showing that if the radius is doubled, the area would change by a factor of 4/. 

In this last week, I spent a lot of time with classroom management and am planning to change the seating chart on Monday from pairs of desks in rows in the classroom to groups of 4 in the effort to get students talking in their groups rather than across the room. Moreover, I implemented a new behavior system where students get three strikes for talking or bad behavior and 3 strikes equates to a phone call home and the second time I have to do this it will be a referral. My students are starting to become more comfortable in the classroom and starting to ignore the classroom expectations. 

Module 6- Teaching Practice

Module 6

In this last week, my students were even more loud and excited because this week was homecoming week and spirit week at school so each day my students were dressed up. This was nice because I was able to connect with my students because I dressed up as well. This allowed my students to see me in a more personal way and connect with me as well. In most of classes, I am working to find my personality in the classroom with my students. Because I am so young, we listen to the same kind of music for the most part, so I find ways to include lyrics from songs when possible and add some fun to the classroom.

While I am doing this in the classroom, I am still trying to remain professional. The balance between fun and professional is difficult and I am airing on the side of caution by trying to stay professional, so I may seem boring to my students at times. I am working to create the environment in my classroom where I can be more fun and involved with my students as I show them my love for math. Lately, I have worked to build relationships with my students to understand their interests in order to make the material more fun to them. I have worked on this through questioning my students who are off task to find what they like, talk about it with them, tell them what I like, connect, and then finally work them through the problem. This process is difficult because I only have to do this in my two large classes where several students are off task regular or refuse to learn.

Teaching my students is difficult enough already, but working to get students who see no value in education and students who do not want to get involved is much harder. This is what I am currently struggling with. As a teacher, I have taken a vow to reach and teach all of my students even if my students do not want to learn. It is hardest to reach these students, but it is also the most rewarding when one of those students does demonstrate understanding and learning.

Module 5- Teaching Practice

Module 5

In this week, I had an observation done by my Stevenson Mentor, MaryCarol. She provided me with detailed feedback for my lesson for my Algebra 2 class on discovery of Hyperbolas.My feedback included tightening up lesson plan activities to hold students accountable for activities. This is something that I know I need to include and plan to implement next week and going forward. Furthermore, MaryCarol recommended observing other veteran teacher in the department as they teach to learn from them because of my situation as a teacher to find new and better ways to handle questioning techniques. In addition, it was recommended that an exit ticket be given to assess student understanding of the material for the day. I did not include one originally because this lesson is a two day lesson with the second day having a poster presentation and each group member has to understand the material in order to complete the poster. Another recommendation for the classroom was a different seating chart that would be more supportive of collaboration. My online concern for this is my Algebra 1 students are too loud and I am concerned of having four students at a table together. So this change will be considered going forward. 

In the last week, my students did a better job of meeting classroom expectations and many students since interim grades came out, are realizing that they need to complete their homework so I had to print out extra copies of the original homework assignments. Now, the parents are invested in the students' grades because they saw poor grades. I am hoping that poor grades will lead to parents getting involved by forcing their children to complete their homework even though it is not graded. I have stressed the importance of homework and practice in relation to doing well on exit tickets and quizzes, but some students do not want to believe that they need to complete the work because they have a good grade so far. They, however, ignore that they material we have covered is mostly review so far. 

Going forward, I expect my successful students who do not complete their homework to face challenges because they may struggle with future materials. I am trying to instill a desire to complete homework regularly because the extra practice will result in total understand of concepts from class. I want my students to responsible for their own education and see me or ask questions when they do not understand. 

Module 4- Teaching Practice

Module 4

In this past week, I have started to see my students get over the "Honeymoon" phase of the beginning of the school year as well as start to test their limits of what they can get away with in the classroom. I have kept my same rules of no cell phones and no music and talking should be kept to inside voice noise level. The class was very loud on Thursday, so I am changing the seating chart in the classroom as well as spending 15 minutes in class Monday to address my classroom expectations again in detail. My hope is that by addressing it Monday will mean that in the future, I will not have to waste as much effort and energy to handle students who fail to meet my expectations on classroom conduct. Along these lines, I am finding that I need to create extreme structure for my algebra 1 classes that are large, 27 and 32 students, while my Honors Algebra 2 students I need to become more laid back and less hands on and let my students take control. I am very on the fence about letting go of the reigns in my honors class because I am so new to this environment and do not want to be in the situation where I give my students an inch and they take a mile, as so often is the case. My honors students are easily motivated and have incredible work ethics, but I am still concerned because they are freshmen and sophomores. 

If my class was Honors or GT and they were seniors, then I would have no problem letting my students run the show in class everyday as a way to prepare them for college and make the classroom a student centered learning environment. My Honors students,  however, sometimes lack the courage to speak up when they are unsure or are too embarrassed to admit they are wrong or confused. I am working to create a growth mindset in all of my classes to encourage participation and have been thinking about keep a list on hand for every class and rewarding consist effort and involvement through candy and food because that is always a good motivator. 

All in all, managing the classroom is my biggest concern and main thing that I wish to develop this year. Along with this, I believe that my planning needs more detail and modification for my classes. I have a teacher in my school who is a department chair who will be assisting me rather than my department chair because he is so busy filling in for a teacher out on injury leave. I am enjoying my co workers and all of the assistance they are providing me as far as tips and lesson planning. 

Module 3- Teaching Practice

Module 3

In the last week, I spent a large amount of my time preparing for my formal observation for a lesson on the Quadratic Formula. All in all, I felt the lesson was well planned with ideas to get students engaged, motivated, and excited to learn. The preparation for this lesson was long and stressful in the hope to receive good feedback and show my administration my ability in the classroom. As the week went along, I continued to work with my students in my Algebra 1 classes to encourage discussions in the classroom as well as getting students out of their seats. These Algebra 1 students as a whole are not completing their homework because it is no longer part of the grade for Baltimore County and students are struggling because they are making mistakes in their work and they are only practicing these skills in class. They are not getting enough repetition to ensure mastery of these concepts and they refuse to do their homework.

I am afraid that many students will fail the first quarter because they are not willing to spend 15-25 minutes completing homework on their own time because they do not feel that work that does not count as a grade is necessary. It is sad because many bright students who would pass the class if they just practiced more may fail my class because they simply do not work on these essential skills in Algebra.

As a teacher, I am unsure of how else to  motivate my students to complete their homework besides by telling them that their homework is almost exactly the same as their quizzes so if they complete their homework, they will be ready for their quizzes. This is a current aspect of the new grading policy that I am struggling with my standard level students.

Module 2- Teaching Practice

Module 2

In the last week, I spent most of my time focusing on improving my classroom management when my students got too loud. For the most part, I felt that I handled my classrooms fairly well especially with my two larger classes of 33 and 29 students. As a new teacher, this is the skill that I am most eager to improve and master. Being able to draw my students back in after they get loud or off topic is so valuable throughout the school year because as students get to know me they will feel comfortable around me and will begin to test their limits in the classroom.

It is my goal that my students will always be engaged and focused in the classroom, but I know this will not always be the case. There will be good days and then there will be Fridays where they have a holiday break and their minds have already been lost by 9 a.m. It is my hope that I can find fun and competitive ways to keep my students interested and learning.

For instance, this last week I noticed that my standard level students were losing interest in the class work even though I made it engaging through using whiteboards and made it group involved as well. I decided mid-class to switch up my plans to have an exit ticket in order to see what my students had learned since many of them were not participating since classwork and participation are no longer part of the grading policy in Baltimore County Public Schools.

The exit ticket brought my students back to attention and allowed me to see what they had learned. I also found the importance of motivating my students through the use of food. I worked with my students through several examples of inequalities for algebra 1 and factoring for algebra 2 and then had students work in groups of 2 for Algebra 1 and groups of 4 for algebra 2 and then had them race to solve problems correctly and the team who answered correctly first got the most points while the last team got only one point and the team who had the most points in the end won Welch's Fruit Snacks. The students liked the competitiveness of this activity and the opportunity to work with their classmates allowed them to help each other through the problem.

All in all, I was exhausted by the end of this week but I felt accomplished as my students did very well on their first quiz and those who did not do well already asked questions and seem to understand the errors that they made.

Module 1- Teaching Practices

Module 1-Teaching Practices

In the classroom for the past week and a half, I have made it a regular occurrence to ask students the hard questions in mathematics when they provide me an answer to a problem or a step towards a solution and that question is "Why?"

Commonly in mathematics, many of us forget about the question or problem being asked and just focus on the numerical value.  I constantly ask my students why because I not only want them to take the correct steps, but want them to understand why they need to those steps. I ask my students to think about their answer in the context of the problem so I am always telling my students to check their answer and tell me if their answer makes sense. For instance, one problem was asking for students to find the weight of the heaviest fish caught in a fishing tournament given the weights of the four other top fish and the average weight of the top 5 fish. I asked my student after we got our answer if it was reasonable and they were unsure how to answer that question at first. I rephrased the question to them and asked, what is the minimum weight that the heaviest fish could weigh? This registered with them and they all said at the minimum it would have had to be .1 lb heavier than the number two fish because the weights of the fish were taken to one decimal place. Then I explained that this is what I meant by my question of a reasonable answer.

By getting my students to think about the importance of the problem and what their answer means, I can work to get my students to visualize multiple ways to solve the problem and work on reading word problems in a fashion that will allow them to create equations to solve word problems accurately and fast.