FEAPS
5e. Engages in targeted professional growth opportunities and reflective practices
As I near the end of my undergraduate studies and time at USF, I can’t help but think about how my future as a teacher has been molded. Throughout my time, I have been a part of the Urban Teacher Residency Partnership Program or UTRPP. This program means being a resident in an elementary school from the start of the program until the finish. It also means integrating coursework into the field experience at my elementary school that I complete my residency at. At first, this seemed a little intimidating because it was so much right from the beginning. How would I be able to balance college level work and be able to hold the responsibilities of a classroom teacher? I was unsure, but I felt that in time, the experience that I would have would all be worth it. As I had hoped, UTRPP surpassed my expectations. Being in this program has allowed me to grow in ways that may not have been afforded to me in another experience (FEAPS 5e). I have been able to participate in the many roles of classroom teacher. I have: completed report card reviews, graded papers, created assessments, differentiated instruction, created behavior management plans, attended district science trainings, held parent teacher conferences, and engaged in PLCs just to name a few. UTRPP being set up as a residency allowed me to be in my school enough to be involved with all of these responsibilities. The residency also jump started the meaningful relationship I have created with my school. I am there 4 days of out of the week which enables me to create bonds with school administration as well as the students. Due to these bonds, I have participated in countless after school functions such as family movie nights. While my experiences in the classroom are priceless, the classes that I have taken through UTRPP have also prepared me in ways that cannot go unrecognized. I have learned how to effectively lesson plan using multiple lesson planning models such as the 5E. I have also learned how to come up with my own behavioral management plan and reflect on my core beliefs in the classroom shown through my philosophies. I have learned how to create STEM lessons, how to complete a lesson study as well as how to use different programs like STEMscopes. Most importantly, I have learned how to have a critical eye and adapt the content knowledge, materials, resources I have been provided to benefit my practice and students. UTRPP helped me grow as a person and as a future educator. My time at UTRPP can’t be replaced and my blog will always be a snapshot of my time in the program. I am forever grateful for the experiences I was afforded and will constantly keep what I have learned in the forefront of my mind.
FEAPS 5e. Engages in targeted professional growth opportunities and reflective practices
0 Comments
This week I continued with working on my inquiry and ultimately writing on a research paper, summarizing the work I have completed. As well as writing this summation, I attended and presented at the Undergraduate Research Colloquium at the University of South Florida. This Colloquium is the largest conference at any Florida university, showcasing the research that students have completed. I presented my inquiry on APTT (academic parent teacher teams) with a few other residents in my program. I decided to attend this conference because I felt it was a great opportunity to highlight the work that I have done using research and because it was another outlet to share what findings my inquiry uncovered (FEAPS 5e). This was also a great chance for me to be exposed to the work of other educators in education and other fields and listen to the work that they have completed. Some of their research might have some connection to my field experience and my practice. Going into the conference, I was excited to share my data that I had collected because data really drives the decisions we make as educators. In this case, my inquiry's data revealed that APTT was a successful conferencing model for my school (FEAPS 5b). Overall, the presentation went smooth. The audience seemed to be responsive to the inquiry and had questions about how this inquiry will continue. After my presentation, I had the opportunity to listen to other presentations in my session. These inquiries were on a variety of topics including implanting math Daily 4 in the classroom to differentiate instruction. The other inquiries sparked my wonderings even more than the wonderings I have from my inquiry. I wonder how I can increase differentiation in my own classroom and how I can find ways to encourage my students to be more accountable in math and reading. Basically, the biggest take away from my experience at the research colloquium is that my work as an educator is never done. There will always be wonderings that I have that can help me improve my practice. There will also always be data that can help me drive decisions that I make in the day to day. I will continue to work on inquiries in the future and hope to explore what type of ways I can improve my own classroom first. And just like that, the research goes on...
FEAPS 5b. Examines and uses data-informed research to improve instruction and student achievement 5e. Engages in targeted professional growth opportunities and reflective practices This week I worked on planning for the second week of the standard,compare and contrast adaptations displayed by animals and plants that enable them to survive in different environments such as life cycle variations, animal behaviors and physical characteristic ,in science. I chose to plan for this standard because it aligned with the science curriculum map for this week (FEAPS 1a). Taking apart the standard, I knew that ultimately, my students needed to be able to know plant adaptations and animal adaptations and be able to compare and contrast. So, the first week of the standard, I focused on animal adaptations. I covered different behavioral and physical adaptations that animals have and why animals might make these adaptations. I knew that my students were ready to move on to talking about plant adaptations because I gave my students a probe called "Habitat Change"(FEAPS 1d). This probe showed me if my students understood what adaptations animals make during environmental changes. When it came to plant adaptations, I knew that these adaptations might be a little unfamiliar to my students so I wanted to find something that would really get them thinking about different types of plant adaptations. I found a Youtube video that showcased seed adaptations and leaf adaptations specifically (FEAPS 3g). It also talked about plant parts which I believed could be used to spark conversation about how stems, roots, and flower petals could be adapted. I decided to use this video paired with questioning throughout to give my students a good introduction to plant adaptations. I, then, decided to provide my students with flash cards that had examples of plants and information about their adaptations on the back. I wanted to use these and have my students make observations about the adaptations and talk about why might plants need to make theses adaptations. I figured this would be a good set up for the next day of plant adaptations where I would engage my students in another video. This Youtube video showed 10 examples of uncommon plants and listed one of their adaptations. This video would be used to give students less common examples of adaptations and would help lead a conversation in other ways plants need to make adaptations then the more common ones covered the day before. I planned to have students then use all the information they have learned to create their own plant that has adaptations. When creating their own plant, I want to have students label the parts of their plant that has adaptations, describe what and why the plant has the adaptations, and describe what might've caused the plant to have the adaptation. Having covered animal adaptations and planning this week for plant adaptations, I believe that by the end of the week my students will have met the learning goals for this standard (FEAPS 1b). This leads me to plan for Friday, my students to complete a summative assessment where they will ultimately compare and contrast plant and animal adaptations. I want to have my students use all the materials that they have been provided over the past two weeks to complete a venn diagram comparing these adaptations (FEAPS 4b). I think this assessment will address the standard and help my students achieve mastery because they will cover both types of adaptations and will allow them to apply all the information that they have learned. So far, I have taught my first lesson on plant adaptations and my students are responding well to what types of adaptations plants have. They are really digging deep in thinking about how plant adaptations aren't only about the stem of the plant, seeds and other parts can also be adapted. I looked forward to seeing how the rest of the week unfolds as we continue to uncover how plants and animals adapt to their environment!
FEAPS 1a. Aligns instruction with state-adopted standards at the appropriate level of rigor 1b. Sequences lessons and concepts to ensure coherence and required prior knowledge 1d. Selects appropriate formative assessments to monitor learning 3g. Apply varied instructional strategies and resources, including appropriate technology, to teach for student understanding 4b. Designs and aligns formative and summative assessments that match learning objectives and lead to mastery This week was the first week back from an enjoyable spring break. Over spring break, I returned home to the east coast of Florida where I spent some much needed quality time with my family. Although, before I kicked off my spring break, I received an email from the college of education at USF saying that I have been nominated for a graduation with distinction award. This award has to do with demonstrating high academic achievement, inquiry, professional development, and service throughout my time at USF. I am proud that I was nominated for this award, but I want to go through with completing the next step of the process to actually receive the award. To proceed, I have to write a statement explaining how I have demonstrated inquiry, professional development, and service and why I deserve the award. So, I decided to sit down and really think about my time at USF and what accomplishments I have made thus far (FEAPS 5e). Over my time at USF, I have completed 2 inquiry conferences and will be completing 2 more by time I graduate. I have covered a school wide inquiry that focused on the effectiveness of conferencing and I have completed an individual inquiry on integrating different subject areas. Through my inquiries, I have learned how important data is in making decisions in my classroom as well as in a school. I have participated in a few district professional development opportunities such as a life science training and STEM fair judging. These training helped me gain resources to shape my practice and give me more direction on what my students need to learn from my teaching. I have also completed about 3,000 hours of working in a elementary school setting and countless hours working in my elementary school after hours working on community events like family movie nights. These opportunities helped me connect with my students and community more and get a better understanding of who is my classroom. These accomplishments are just a snapshot of my time a USF and only scratch the service in revealing what I have learned from my time at USF. Although, I think that they do showcase how I have committed myself to better myself and the community in which I spend time working with. This award not only would be an honor, but it has really put into perspective how far I have come from entering USF only two years ago. I know that as my time at USF winds down and I transition into being a classroom teacher that my demonstration of inquiry, professional development, and service will only began to grow more.
FEAPS 5e. Engages in targeted professional growth opportunities and reflective practices This week I presented my inquiry on APTT conferencing to educators from all over the United States at a national association for professional development schools (NAPDS) conference (FEAPS 5e). This was my first professional conference that I've attended and it took place in Washington D.C. Going into the conference, I knew that I was an expert on my inquiry and APTT so I felt confident about what I needed to relay to my audience, but I hadn't had this experience before so I didn't really know how things would go. All I could do beforehand is make sure that I understood the data that I analyzed and how I came about making claims about the data. I thought this would be best for me to focus on because I wanted to my claims to be data-driven so other prospective APTT participants could really understand what works best and what doesn't. When it got to the day of presenting, the presentation room was filled with people. This was rewarding because it showed that people did have a genuine interest in what I had to say regarding APTT. During the presentation, I stuck to what the data said and made sure I highlighted the inductive reasoning that I used. Inductive reasoning is when the data introduces what information I can code by. I emphasized this because it helped me support my claims and showed how the exit slip that I analyzed could be used. The audience seemed to receive the information that I expressed and understood the limitations of the exit slip as well. I would call my first experience presenting at such a big conference successful. I think that I told people what they needed to know and they responded well. Although, in future conferences, I think that it would be beneficial to me gather even more data so other people, as well as myself, have a larger time frame to see trends. I also think it would be beneficial to me anticipate some of the questions people might have so I am prepared to respond effectively. Other than that, I had a great experience. The next conference I will be attending will be a University of South Florida inquiry conference where I will present the same inquiry. I will have another set of data to analyze before the conference and will be able to apply some of the reflections I had from the NAPDS conference. I look forward to furthering my practice through these conferences because they really exposed me to educators outside of my county and allowed me to grow as an educator myself.
FEAPS 5e. Engages in targeted professional growth opportunities and reflective practices This week my partnership school and I prepared for the 3rd round of parent-teacher conferencing. At my school, we are trying out a new method of conferencing called APTT. APTT stands for academic parent teacher teams. This model of conferencing removes the one on one parent teacher interaction (unless an individual/teacher requests one) and invites parents to come together with others parents to work together and learn ways to help their students using materials like flash cards that are provided. Parents are also able to anonymously see how their child compares to other students in the same grade in reading and math. So far, parents seem to enjoy the new method just by watching them during each session, but do the materials and information provided at APTT really help students? This wondering is the driving force of the inquiry that I am collaboratively doing with other members of the school. I want to see if student achievement is effected by this new conferencing model. My inquiry group and I are taking different pieces of quantitative and qualitative data from APTT to help us gain more insight towards this question. The data we have collected are graphs showing student achievement, any questions parents have, and the exit slips that they complete after an APTT session. I decided to analyze the exit slips using inductive reasoning which means I am looking at the data before I figure out what information I think is important (FEAPS 5b). Once I started looking at the exit slips from APTT session 1 and 2, I realized that during APTT 1, parents were providing a lot of positive comments about learning their students progress and being provided materials. From APTT 2, I realized that most parents were able to meet their child's math and reading goal and spent around 1-4 hours using the materials provided. These findings helped me create claims and graphs to display these claims. These findings also helped me figure out what information is most important from the exit slips to help me create the exit slip for APTT 3. I decided that since the focus of my inquiry is parent involvement and student achievement, keeping questions that related to meeting a child's goal would be beneficial. I also decided that the amount of time parents spent working with their student was beneficial because that seemed to effect if their child met their goal or not. APTT will be tomorrow and the exit slip I created will be used after we discuss with parents the latest skills (FEAPS 5d).
The last APTT was a success. Veteran parents showed up with smiles, prepared to get their materials and learn about their student. We started off the meeting with parents sharing thoughts about their experience so far. Many raved about how they loved this method of conferencing. Although, were students meeting their reading and math goals set? Based off of the graphs that we showed during the conference, most students made gains when being assessed of the math and reading skills. This showed me that APTT had some type of positive effect. However, I don't think I have enough data to fully conclude that the student achievement was directly improved by student achievement. I will still continue to build on gathering data to support my inquiry and will continue to make claims based on the data. I plan on presenting my current findings at the NAPDS (national association for professional development schools) in Washington D.C. this week and hope to encourage other educators to try and implement this new way of conferencing. FEAPS 5b. Examines and uses data-informed research to improve instruction and student achievement 5d. Collaborates with the home, school and larger communities to foster communication and to support student learning and continuous improvement This week I implemented my science focused STEM lesson on the human body. I chose to do my STEM lesson on this topic because it aligned with the standard for this week and last week, SC.5.L.14.1 Identify the organs in the human body and describe their functions. (FEAPS 1a). Students had also already had a weeks' worth of lessons on organs (FEAPS 1b). In my STEM class, we learned about what a lesson study is. I learned that its an opportunity to take a lesson and see how you and your colleagues can improve it each time its being taught to make it more student centered. For my science focused STEM lesson, I underwent a lesson study with the other 5th grade residents in my program. We each would teach the same STEM lesson and then would try to improve the lesson as we move to the next resident teaching. The STEM lesson consisted of my students taking on the roll of biomedical engineers. They would be assigned an organ and would need to make a page to be added to a medical textbook that included a picture of the organ and a description of the function of the organ and that would need to make a 3D model of the organ using clay (FEAPS 1 and 3bf). After giving my students a organs pretest prior to the lesson and a self-assessment where students write the top 3 organs they felt the least comfortable with, I decided that it would be better to have students do more than one organ (FEAPS 1d and 3c). This would allow the 5 main organs that all students felt they needed help with to be addressed and would still allow for the remaining organs to be covered. The client was a second grade class at my school, so I wanted to make sure that the second graders learned about all organs we covered. The STEM lesson was designed to be taught over a two day period, so on day 1, I wanted my students to get through the first three steps of the engineering design process: identifying the problem, brainstorming a solution, and planning their design. I started day 1 by going over the request for proposal that told students what they had to create. Once everyone was clear, I let my students get with their group and start. My lesson study group and I documented the student thinking and questions that were asked (FEAPS 3i). This allowed us to really get a feel for how the students were doing which was the main focus. I noticed that students were really applying what they knew about the organs into their design challenge sheet. They were making sure they put a lot of detail when brainstorming how their organ should look and what information to include. Although, I don't think that I was really clear on how what students were doing applying to engineering and the engineering practices. I also don't think that I highlighted the design process as much as I should've. I know that each step were headings in the design challenge sheet, but I didn't really mention them throughout the lesson. Reflecting on the things that I think I would change in my lesson with my lesson study group helped us improve another resident's lesson on day 1. She did her lesson about 10 minutes after mine and we were able to implement the lack of the engineering components and explicit language about the design process into her lesson. This reflection also helped me adjust my lesson for day 2. In day 2 of my STEM lesson, I decided to adjust my teaching by starting with the engineering practices. I wrote them on the board, read them, and talked to students about what those practices meant (FEAPS 2e). The purpose was to have students be thinking about how they were applying the engineering practices while they moved into to the building phase of the design process. The engineering practices that connected to this lesson were developing and creating a model and obtaining, evaluations, and communicating information. With these being understood, my students finished any final touches on their plans and were able to begin creating their textbook page and begin building. As my lesson study group and I did day 1, we documented any student thinking or questions that were brought up. For me, this was hard because my students and I were really invested in the lesson. Despite this, my students creating a textbook page that included a picture and description of the organ really helped my students with their 3D model. They were able to produce models that looked like the organs that they had been studying and were able to explain in detail what they organ does. Once the end of the lesson was nearing, I made sure I brought my students back together to tie in the engineering practices again. I asked them to mention some ways that they used the engineering practices as biomedical engineers. They mentioned things like "we created a model of the organ" and "we communicated with our group to find out what information was important". This showed me that they recognized how engineering played a part in the lesson. This also showed me the importance of mentioning the engineering practices. I did mention that in day 2 my students would be moving to the build and test step in the design process, but I didn't go that far in detail. Although, this was still an improvement from day 1. In my next STEM lesson, I think I can improve on this by posting the practices on the board and making sure I review this throughout the lesson. I didn't get through the last components of the lesson or the design process, so that will be finished in an additional day of the STEM lesson. I haven't formally met with my lesson study group yet to debrief, but I learned that lesson studies can really benefit my practice. It allows me to see how I am relaying information to my students and helps me gain insight on how what I plan comes alive in the classroom. Seeing someone do the same lesson allows me to take a step back and really see how the students are receiving the lesson. It also allows me to receive immediate feedback and adjust my teaching accordingly. I think my students were able to benefit from this as well by me improving my practice. I also think my students were able to benefit from having their thoughts and questions heard because it was more one on one attention. Overall, the lesson student was a good experience. I look forward to debriefing with my groups and applying some of the suggestions to my lessons in the future.
FEAPS 1a. Aligns instruction with state-adopted standards at the appropriate level of rigor; 1b. Sequences lessons and concepts to ensure coherence and required prior knowledge 1d. Selects appropriate formative assessments to monitor learning 1f. Develops learning experiences that require students to demonstrate a variety of applicable skills and competencies 2e. Models clear, acceptable oral and written communication skills 3b. Deepen and enrich students' understanding through content area literacy strategies, verbalization of thought, and application of the subject matter 3c. Identify gaps in students' subject matter knowledge 3i. Support, encourage, and provide immediate and specific feedback to students to promote student achievement This week I had the opportunity to volunteer at the district STEM fair. I was a judge for the 3rd grade group physical science category and got to work alongside other education majors and members of the district. After being in the classroom and helping my own 5th graders complete their STEM fair projects, it was interesting and different to see the finished products of projects that made it past the school level. It also gave me a chance to see a wide variety of different projects to get a visual of what is expected from students. Often when I was teaching different components of the scientific process, my own students didn't know how they were supposed to translate the concept to their own projects. This made me realize, I hadn't seen any actual projects either and wasn't clear of the expectations (FEAPS 5e). I was only going by what I had did in the science fair when I was in school. Being at the STEM fair alone, I was able to see how students' logs came together and how students were actively engaged in a scientific process. Being a judge, however, gave me even more insight. As I judged the projects, I was going based off of a rubric provided by the district. This rubric broke down what the main components of the projects were and what was most important to have a successful project. The rubric helped me focus the questions I asked the participants and sparked ideas for my future students' STEM fair projects. I realized, just like the rubric helped me assess the participants in the STEM fair, I could use it as a self-assessment for my own students. This will help them shape what they need to be doing. I could pair this with some examples of previous projects and my student would be able to get a visual of how to go about completing their project. While judging, I got many countless opportunities to converse with students about their projects. This helped me gain a perspective of what students understand about the components of their project like the data. Some questions that I frequently asked students were "what trends did you notice in your data/what did you notice about your data?" and "what did you decide to change in your experiment?" Students seemed to really get hung up on these questions and often asked me "what is data" or would just tell me something they liked about their project. This was kind of alarming because I know in my class, we explicitly taught about data and variables. Now, I know that students can sometimes forget, but I felt when it came to having to present their work, the students should at least know the ins and outs of what they did. This deficit along with seeing so many projects inspired a few goals that I want to set for my future in STEM fair teaching (FEAPS 5a). When I am teaching the components of the scientific process like data and variables, I really want to make sure that my students have a strong understanding of what each part means before applying it to their project. I think its more important to know how interpret data and understand the scientific process than to complete a project and not know what you did. I also want to make sure I do my part and give my students tons of examples of different scientific processes and different project logs because those were the most important parts of STEM in general. Overall, the STEM fair was a great experience to really help me understand what STEM is all about. I hope to be able to participate in something like this again and further my STEM knowledge even more.
FEAPS 5a. Designs purposeful professional goals to strengthen the effectiveness of instruction based on students' needs 5e. Engages in targeted professional growth opportunities and reflective practices This week was literacy week for the district. In honor of literacy week, there was a school wide door decorating contest to decorate your door based on your favorite book or literacy views. My CT and I decided on the theme "Dive into a good book". The concept behind this theme was that our students would be scuba divers and would be diving into whatever book that they were currently reading. I liked this theme because it aligned with some of the viewpoints I have on literacy and some of the views I have began to redevelop now that I am teaching ELA more often. I still stand behind the ideas that I want my students to be captivated by the idea of the book before we even begin reading it. I believe that will get them excited about reading versus making them read something they wouldn’t read on their own. I think that in order to teach literacy you have to provide options. Options can be introduced through RAFTs, learning menus, cubing, and so many other ways. You can’t limit students and expect them to respond in the way that you want to. You have to allow them to find what works for them. When it comes to assessing literacy, it should be assessed in the way that it is taught. There should be options of how students display their understanding, whether it be by book report, acting it out, making a song, or drawing a picture. As long as the student can explain how they came up with their work, they shouldn’t have to conform. I think tests should still be a part of the assessments, but shouldn’t have a lot of weight put on them because some students just don’t respond well to those types of assessments no matter how much understanding they have. Based on how I was taught literacy, when teaching, I never want to make my students fit a black and white image of how things should be. I was always forced to read things under a time constraint, that weren’t for me. Knowing how painful that was, I never want to make students do that. I know that certain aspects of the curriculum have to be met, but I feel that those things can be accomplished in ways that are individual to the student. Teaching literacy needs to include understanding reading and writing in a way that the student understands it for them not for anyone else. Now that I have been more active in teaching literacy, I have added to some of my beliefs about literacy. One main point that I added was that I think that literacy is just as collaborative as any other subject area. I think that students should be talking and interacting with each other. I think that they should share their thoughts and hear other students perspectives just as much as they do in other subject areas. This week in my residency, I found ways to make this belief evident in my teaching. One way in particular was while I was planning and teaching a lesson from the LDC module on earth and space (FEAPS 1a). This lesson involved students concluding whether Pluto should or shouldn't be considered a planet. The LDC teacher's manual wanted me to instruct students to read two text and answer the response question. No matter how convenient and pre-planned this was, I knew that it wasn't right for my students and knew that it didn't support my teaching philosophy of being actively involved and engaged in learning. To combat this, I modified the LDC lesson and decided to have my students participate in a debate (FEAPS 3a,3b,3g). I still wanted my students to gather evidence for the texts to help form and support their arguments, but I wanted it to go a step farther than just reading and then writing. I decided to divide my students into two teams. I differentiated the groups based off of their ability throughout the LDC and ELA time (FEAPS 1b,3h). I then assigned each group their argument. My students who were more advanced had to defend that Pluto was a planet because the texts provided contained less concrete information to support this. My students who needed more practice were given the argument that Pluto was not a planet because it was less abstract and the texts offered a lot of evidence that they could build off of. I had the two groups read both text and only code for their argument. They then added their evidence to a worksheet that I created with the thought that my students needed a bigger and more clear way to organize their thoughts than in their booklet. At the bottom of the worksheet, I had a note telling my students to create a question to ask the other team. This allowed every student to draw on the evidence they collected and apply it to the debate. Once students finished coding and creating a question, I told the groups who would be representing them and gave them some time to prep their speaker with evidence. The speakers were students who normally don't speak as much. Then, the debate began. I used the questions students created to prompt the speakers and allowed the speakers to consult with their group before answering (FEAPS 2f). This ended up going great. The teams were pulling all the information they collected from the text and used it to benefit their argument. Nearly all of my students were invested and both sides were actively listening to what evidence the other team gave to answer the questions. The students responded to the essential question after the debate: What conclusion can you draw about why Pluto should or shouldn't be considered a planet? It was interesting to see how multiple students changed their opinions based on the evidence mentioned during the debate. I think that I could've improved the lesson by displaying the questions being asked on the board so some of the answers were more focused on what the question was asking (FEAPS 5e). I also think that when students responded to the essential question, I had some type of self-assessment for students to grade their own writing on. This would've helped my students editing their pieces and making sure it had all the necessary components. Overall, I think my lesson was a great experience for my students and myself. They were able to really get into literacy and understand how things like debates can be applied to have supportive evidence. I was able to really practice what I believe in and foster those interactive experiences that I really stand behind. I want to continue to examine my literacy practices in the future and keep developing my philosophy. I look forward to using more components of my philosophy to help shape my teaching! FEAPS 1a. Aligns instruction with state-adopted standards at the appropriate level of rigor; 1b. Sequences lessons and concepts to ensure coherence and required prior knowledge 2f. Maintains a climate of openness, inquiry, fairness support 3a. Deliver engaging and challenging lessons 3b. Deepen and enrich students' understanding through content area literacy strategies, verbalization of thought, and application of the subject matter 3g. Apply varied instructional strategies and resources, including appropriate technology, to teach for student understanding 3h. Differentiate instruction based on an assessment of student learning needs and recognition of individual differences in students 5e. Engages in targeted professional growth opportunities and reflective practices Since the beginning of the school year, I have noticed how my students struggle with following directions. Even more, now that we have kicked off the third nine weeks, it seems like my students are having a harder time with what they should be doing despite how many days they've been in school. Seeing this problem, I decided to take a step back and reflect on myself (FEAPS 5e). I thought about what types of phrases and ways of giving directions am I using with my students. I figured that it might not be the students at all, but my own communication skills. I knew that I try to repeat directions while counting off the steps that students have to do (ex. first, you're going to put your materials away) to help them keep track of the tasks. I even would try to give students one task at a time so they don't have to worry about what they are doing next. Although, maybe that wasn't enough for my students. My PRT had once mentioned writing directions on the board and not speaking at all to students about what they needed to do. Thinking of ways I can improve my communication skills to ultimately get the most out of my lessons, I figured I give this a try. During my ELA lesson this week, I started off the lesson as normal. I gave students verbal instructions. However, once I released students to read their text, I began writing instructions on the white board for students to do once they were finished. Some instructions included text coding while rereading and filling in a text dependent chart. At first students were raising their hands asking what they should do next, I quietly directed their attention towards the board and left it at that. Eventually, students began to catch on to where they could find their next step. I noticed all of them were working at their own pace and everyone knew exactly what they were supposed to be doing. I think this strategy was overall effective for my students and myself as well. For me, I eliminated the monotony of repeating directions and still not have them being followed. I also feel like I was able to appeal to my students learning styles better. I have noticed that a lot of my students don't do well when we have audio texts and of course the difficulty with following auditory directions. Although, when visuals like models and a text in front of them are presented, they tend to do better. I think this contributed to the success for my students and I because I gave directions in a way that fits their needs. I learned from this experience that its okay to change the way I normally do things like giving directions if its best for my students because ultimately, its about them. For my students, I think they were able to know what was going on and where the lesson was going. From this point forward, I want to start incorporating different ways to give directions like this one. I think it takes my practice to the next level by progressing my communication skills and I think it engages and challenges my students to be focused on what is going on in the lesson. It also allows me to keep reflecting on myself to make sure that I am being as clear as possible. I plan on teaching ELA and science for the rest of the week and will use some more written directions. Although next time, I might try having directions printed out so I can save time instead of writing everything out on the board. Overall it was a good strategy to implement into my practice and I look forward to what other ways my students and I can keep learning. FEAPS 2e. Models clear, acceptable oral and written communication skills 2h. Adapts the learning environment to accommodate the differing needs and diversity of students 5e. Engages in targeted professional growth opportunities and reflective practices |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
April 2016
Categories |