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.