The stress of winding down!

One word to describe my experiences this week student teaching would be worry. I’m worried that we’ve fallen too far behind for subject matter and I’m worried about the end of the semester and all the work coming up for me. I was also worried about my content area test for psychology and my APT test I took on Saturday. I can’t help but worry about things like this. As far as my tests go, I think I did pretty well. My students are behind in psychology by about a week and in Government by about a week. This worries me but I see that other teachers are about that far behind as well and it makes me feel a little better. As far as the end of the semester goes, I’m just going to have to be more organized with my time.

As far as assessment with my students, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve had lots of practice creating my own assessments. I have also had practice re-teaching material I thought my students learned and didn’t. I’ve learned that your assessments have to be well put together, if they are not the students may know the material but will be confused by your assessment. I’ve learned that assessment has to be done frequently, so you don’t get to the end of a unit and realize your students didn’t learn what they needed to learn. I’ve learned that like everything in teaching, I need to reflect on how my students did with the assessment and compare their performance on each object with how I taught that objective.

I use informal assessments quite a bit with my students, a simple did you understand this concept give me a thumbs up or a thumbs down, or a question about the concept we just learned and having a few people share their answer to assess how well they learned the concept works well in my class. When I’m worried that my students might need more teaching on a concept I have been known to give a quick pop quiz. I usually don’t record my students’ scores but I do use them to see if I need to go back and re-teach something. As a way to get my students involved in their own self-assessment I am going to have them help me make up the test for the unit we are about to finish in psychology. It will help my students start to think about what the important concepts were in the unit and how they should be studying for the test.

When it comes to assessment, I know that some of my students struggle because English is not their first language. I use methods like oral questioning to informally assess what these students know. I also have given many of these students practice tests with similar wording as the real test to help prepare them. When it comes to my vocabulary quizzes I have learned that I need to go over their vocabulary with them and when I am going over the vocabulary I need to use the same definition for the word as I will use on the quiz. I’ve learned that all of this helps but a quiet classroom and an untimed period for the quiz also really works for these students.

As for my goals this week;

1. Treating every class like it’s a new and wonderful class works pretty well unless the class before that class was horrible. This past week, I’ve made improvements to all of my classes so it has been relatively easy to treat each class like it’s a new class.
2. I did find some time to study for my tests and I think I’m going to stick to a new goal instead of a social life goal. My new goal this week is to plan out a few lessons where I can co-teach with my cooperating teacher.
3. Another new goal I am going to make for myself is to talk with my cooperating teacher about how to improve my assessments. This has been a conversation we’ve had before but he always has good ideas for me.
4. As Christmas and Thanksgiving draw near, healthy eating is going to get harder and harder. So I’m going to focus on cooking at least three meals this week for myself instead of finding easy and unhealthy meals.
5. The only reason I’m getting through this student teaching experience is because of God. I am so thankful that he is always around to support me.
6. It’s not hard to focus on the positive students in my classroom. Focusing on these students while still helping the struggling students has really helped me stay positive.
7. My goals this week for job hunting is to fix up my resume and resubmit it to my professor. Also I need to submit my letters of recommendation forms.
8. Its my goal this week to have both my classes not caught up but closer to being caught up by Thanksgiving.
9. My goal of deepening my relationships with my students has become my new ongoing goal.
10. My last goal is that I can catch up on grading.

That is it for now, please pray for me, I have a lot going on in these last couple weeks of student teaching. 

~Abby