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.