The Art of Teaching

In the school I am currently at, I have a mixture of different ethnic backgrounds, but overall I still do have Caucasian children in the majority of my six classes. In the total one hundred and thirty-five students I teach, there are nineteen African American, one Hispanic, and one hundred fifteen Caucasian students. The one Hispanic student I have in class does have English as a second language, but he is adapting well to his surroundings. However, I have found that even though the student understands and can speak the English language well, there seems to be a disconnect with taking tests. When I do talk with this student to determine where things might have went wrong, we came to the conclusion that the student just did not fully understand what the question was specifically asking or misread an answer to a question and ended up selecting the wrong response by mistake. In all honesty, we have all been there were at some point on a test we misread a question or answer and ended up ...

Out of all the educational theorist I have been exposed to, I would say that I look up to Dewey and Piaget. This is mainly due to the ideal that the main take home messages that these two theorists in my opinion truly go hand in hand. John Dewey places such a heavy emphasis on the ideal of hands-on learning. Being a science teacher, I think Life science is a subject in which one has many opportunities to engage students in activities that allow for students to learn the content being taught to them. When it comes to Piaget, he focused heavily on the ideal of having students be engaged in their own learning by utilizing their prior background knowledge to form connections to the new content that students are learning.              Due to me looking up to these theorists so much, I do my best to incorporate these principles into my instruction. For instance, in the first unit of the school year, I had students complete a project in which students...

As we are entering the last quarter of the year (unofficially), I have a few goals for myself. These are to continue building positive rapport, managing my classroom better, and determining how to use questioning better to aide in guiding instruction. During my experiences, I would probably say that the high points are being in the classroom every day. Even if the class was not perfect, it still supplies me with information that a particular component or activity within a lesson does not work. This means for me that there is something out there or a different technique that can be used to relay the same information while also keeping students engaged the entire time. While this has been my first year, there have been many highs and lows for this year. Out of all of my experiences, I would say that would be when I had one student goofing off when getting their goldfish out of the tank for a lab. This resulted in the lid to separate from the container and goldfish were EVERYWHERE. At ...

For my time as a new teacher, we are into the third quarter so I have seen that there has been a decline in the work ethic in my students. Particularly with my Biology kiddos, I sense their feeling of frustration because of the lack of snow days and the consistent five day school weeks. However, there was a day where six consistent students were not doing the right thing (school and classroom policy wise). Normally, I try to give students benefit of the doubt and if they correct their behavior after a warning, I do not always feel the need to call home. However, my students’ behavior persisted which in turn resulted in me calling six parents that day!             When I called each parent, they all were supportive and understood that I care about their child and just want them to be in an environment where they are able to learn in the best environment possible. One parent I called was about phone use, and I just read over th...

At the end of ED640, we were prompted to create goals for ourselves as educators to better serve the students we teach every day. My overall goal is to keep my students engaged in activity from bell to bell. One of the biggest battles I have had in classroom management is that my students were not always engaged in lesson activities. This would cause for my students to become bored and thus engage in off task behavior that usually consisted of side conversations that distracted the class from the tasks that they were supposed to be accomplishing at that time. To better alleviate these issues, I really took the time to get to know my students and I realized that they love to have any excuse to move around. Therefore, I made an effort to create jobs for my few students that love to move around. One of my newest classroom management strategies was to incorporate a sticker system for successful completion of the bell ringer/ drill prior to the timer going off after five minutes have elap...

        This will be my fourth reflective blog and it is amazing to see the growth and improvement I have had thus far. While at times it has been a difficult journey, I have learned that I take criticism well. My face might not look like it while I am processing what is being said to me but I internalize the feedback I am given to allow for me to better myself as a teacher. Over the past two weeks, I have learned that things will not always be perfect. In my forensics classes, my kiddos just started their unit on impressions and we started to look at how a cast is made of a shoeprint using dental stone, dirt, and some water.         With this being my first time working with these materials, I was not expecting perfect results from each lab group but I was hopeful that I would at least get some good results. My first class of students casts looked like a pile of mush. At first I was disappointed that things did not work out and felt like I faile...

This will be my third reflective blog that I have made for the school year thus far. As I have mentioned in my previous blog entries, it has been a rollercoaster. I have been preparing for an observation with School A and I have felt a great deal of stress given that I had to write my first observation for a student being unsafe in the science classroom. I was in a state of confusion and panic because I have never had to write one before within this scenario and was unsure of what to do. I came to my principal to figure out how to document this and then I found myself arguing back and forth about the phone policies in the school. While my principal was upset that a student in my class filmed what happened (misuse of flammable chemicals) I was thankful to the student who filmed because it validated everything I said within the behavioral referral. At the end of the conference, my principal was thankful that I came to clarify what to do so that I knew the correct procedures were being...