Last Student Teaching Blog Post

Summarizing this past week into one work, that word would be emotional. I’m so excited to finally be done but I don’t want to leave these students. I like my students and they like me. They don’t understand why I cannot continue to teach them psychology. I also found out that I passed the last two test I needed to pass to become a teacher and teach psychology. I finished my eportfolio and several other assignments that seemed so daunting. It still hasn’t sunk in that I am going to be done in less than a week.  The prospects of the real world are also quite frightening. I’ve found myself reflecting on this past semester. Trying to remember what I thought student teaching would be like, compared to what it actually was.

Our school policies and procedures are clear and strictly enforced at my student teaching placement. I learned that in a school like the one I’m at; writing passes can be a danger to myself, the student and other students in the school With gang activity, constant fights breaking out and the culture of the school, by following the no pass policy I’m keeping my students and others safe. The other strictly enforced policy is one they just started enforcing. It is the policy, if you’re not in your classroom by the time the bell rings you’re late. I believe the school is implementing this policy because students don’t really understand why being late is not okay. We’ve had several discussions in our department meetings about preparing students for the real world and this is one of those preparations. The saying at the school I’m at. If you’re early you’re on time, if you’re on time, you’re late.

This semester I did an action research project on the best ways to teach vocabulary. I learned a ton in my placement, in department meetings and in my education class about teaching and learning. Mostly it was in my own classroom that I learned the most about teaching and learning. Some things have to be tried and have to fail in order for you to learn that even though something sounds good on paper, it doesn’t mean that will work in the classroom.

I started three referrals of a student for special education this semester. Before initiating a referral of a student for special education I met with them, I tried to figure out if there was something going on this semester that was hindering them from doing well in my class. I also sent emails out to their other teachers, asking if they were having the same issue I was. I also checked to see if they already had an RTI in the system. After all of that I started some interventions to see if there was a simple fix to my students’ problems. Only after trying all of those things did I start a referral of a student for special education.

One of the most important things I learned this semester about choosing education as my profession is that how we educate students is always changing. This means that we need to be able to change with the system. We are always going to be looking for better ways to teach something and better ways to educate our students. If this isn’t being done then we are doing our students a disservice. I think the most important thing I learned this semester about being an educator is that I was meant to do this. I may not be perfect at it like I thought I would be but I was still born to teach.

The Schmidt chapter that challenged me the most was the chapter on communication and collaboration with parents. Up until we read that chapter I hadn’t done much collaboration with parents. I had communicated with some parents but I hadn’t really got them involved in their child’s education in my classroom. After reading Schmidt’s chapter I realized I could really use the help of my students’ parents. I was pleasantly surprised after contacting several parents about their students’ behavior or grades that the students’ attitudes and work ethic did change for the positive.

Instead of reflecting on the last goals I created I would like to reflecting on the first 7 goals I created.

1. Being the best teacher I can be. This idea of best teacher change throughout the semester. I think the most surprising thing to me was that often this included taking care of myself, more then it included what I was doing in the classroom. Not that I put me as a priority over my students. Just that I tended to get caught up in everything that had to be done and forgot to take care of myself.
2. Not going crazy. Does it count that I am still here relatively sane. J
3. Maintaining a healthy social life. Well I wasn’t a hermit this semester but God sure does have a sense of humor. He likes to give me a good challenge and he did challenge me this semester. I had gone the last three years without a boyfriend and he chooses my busiest semester to make that happen.
4. Better my relationship with God. Well I think that was bound to happen, with me depending on him for so much.
5. Do not procrastinate. Does it count that I didn’t with my students?
6. Find a job. I found a job that I went to once a week while student teaching for a couple hours. But I think this was more referring to a teaching job, which I haven’t found.
7. Eating healthier happened for the most part.

As for my goals from last week

8. Co-planning and teaching did not go well. My cooperating teacher was barely in the room. Planning went better then co-teaching. I was disappointed my cooperating teacher wasn’t able to be in the room more, for my last week.
9. The lessons that my cooperating teacher was in the room for went very well so the lessons were planned out well.
10. We will have to see how my students transition back into having my co-operating teacher back in the classroom full time.

 This is my last student teaching blog post but hopefully it will not be the last blog post I make about the life of a teacher. My student teaching class is giving the reins back to me. From now on only posts about the struggles of finding a teaching job and hopefully the struggles of being a first and second year teacher. 

Keep praying please, 

~Abby

Wow, Almost there

Wow I can’t believe I only have a week in a half left of student teaching. It seems like yesterday that I was just starting to student teach and I was scared silly. One thing that I would say I am pretty good at now is reflecting. Reflecting helped me grow as a teacher and become better at teaching. Reflecting is always going to be part of helping me grow professionally because its forcing me to take a look at a lesson did or did not work. How I did overall for the week and what I can be improving on.

With every observation I had I improved dramatically. My supervisor was amazing. He had amazing ideas and suggestions but he also did amazing reminding me what we learned in our education classes to help improve my teaching. When my supervisor observed me and the observation when really bad he had me reflect first on what I thought was the problem and what I thought should be changed. I really struggled with classroom management and my supervisor gave me some great ideas to fix that. With this last observation he said he could see real improvement with my classroom management.

I have found that my knowledge of learning disabilities was invaluable, but I still have so much more to learn. I did find myself seeking out knowledge and opinions from other teachers and especially the special education teachers. They would give me pointers and also give me words of encouragement. I was sent links to activities that would help me teach a subject better and teachers also gave me the lesson plans they’ve used in the past that have worked. I plan to continue this practice when I get a job teaching. I found student teaching that the advise and collaboration of experienced teachers is invaluable.

As for my goals this week;

1. Treating every class like it’s a new and wonderful class is still working, stopping and praying before each class is a must and I will continue this practice.  
2. Co-teaching all this week will be interesting and that is going to take some praying as well.
3. I’m praying that my students will be ready for their final exams.
4. Healthy eating is on and off with the stress but still going well over all.  
5. God time is still a work in progress.
6. Focusing on the positive students has really helped keep my classroom environment positive. The students who were acting negative saw me thanking the students who were acting positive and now they are acting more positive.
7. My lesson in government to solely use technology is this week and hopefully it goes well.

8.      I’m in my last week of full time teaching and co-teaching with my co-operating teacher so I’m praying that goes well. Co-planning did not go as I thought it would.

9.      Lessons to use co-teaching have been put into place and I’m hoping that the students also take full advantage of having both teachers in the classroom.

10.  I’m hoping that my students transition well back to my cooperating teacher and I plan to help with that as much as possible. This is my new goal for the rest of my time student teaching.

Pray that this week goes well and that the transition goes smoothly,

Almost done, 

~Abby

Thanksgiving Blues

This past week was a short week for us because of thanksgiving break. Instead of the energy from last week which I was expecting to be more intense this week. I had pure exhaustion from my students instead. I think they were just burnt out and sick of all their teachers testing them this week. Which I have to guiltily say I was one of those teachers. One thing I was working on this week, which isn’t really new but It was a focus this week was communicating with the parents of my students. Last week at the end of the week I sent home a not to the parents of the students who were getting a D or an F in my class. Now this was no new information to the parents of these students. I’ve found that the more I keep that communication with those parents open, the better my students do. The barriers to family relationships is that sometimes it doesn’t matter how hard you work to communicate, you just get some parents who wont communicate back.

I email my parents/ guardians, I call home and I send progress reports and letters home to help open lines of communications with my students’ families. As for my students who have learning disabilities I have another very important line of communication and that is with their PDS teachers. Their PDS teachers help my students with learning disabilities stay organized and get their work in. All I have to do is email these teachers about missing work or an upcoming test and they will help me keep that student performing well in my class. I hope that when I have my own classroom we have a similar system put into place for our students with learning disabilities. I plan to do all of the things I’m doing now with the students in my future classroom.

As for using the community in my classroom I can think of so many ways to do this in my future classroom. I’ve already used some of the ideas but I can have my students do a case study on their own community. I can have community members come in and talk with my students about their jobs and how they use psychology to improve the community. Or for history, the history behind their own community. I could do field trips not only to gain more knowledge of the communities history but also to see how psychology has an effect on the people of their community. I could also have my students use their own knowledge to give back to their community. The possibilities are endless, especially with the classes I teach.

As for my goals this week;

1. Treating every class like it’s a new and wonderful class is working better because I stop and pray before each class.  
2. I have another lesson planned that will involve some more co-teaching this week. I planned with my cooperating teacher this time so hopefully it goes better.
3. As for my assessment this past week, my students seemed to do okay on it, not as well as I hoped they would do. I found five questions that over 50 percent of them got wrong so I had to throw those out. They were not reliable. I believe its because these questions were poorly written and they confused my students.
4. Healthy eating went well especially over thanksgiving. I was quite proud of myself.
5. I still need to find more time to just spend with God.  
6. Focusing on the students doing well in my class or the students with positive attitudes have helped me stay positive and this week I’ve been thanking the students who are positive.
7. I have a lesson that is solely using technology planned but I haven’t been able to do that lesson yet. It is coming up next week
8. I learned that there is tons of different available technology to the teachers at the school I’m student teaching at but most of it requires hours of training in order to use it. When I have my own classroom that training would be well worth it.  
9. My plans for the rest of my time student teaching is to successfully co-teach for the last week of full time teaching with my cooperating teacher.
10.  Also I plan to Come up with lessons that take the fullest advantage of co teaching. 

I'm also getting observed this week so pray that goes well. 

~Abby

Thanksgiving anticipation.

for the delay in posting. The last few weeks have been hectic.

One word that describes my teaching experience for this week is anticipation. Everyone is anticipating Thanksgiving break. They kids are hyper and ready for the break and the teachers seem to be hitting a wall. I’ve heard more than one teacher say we just have to get to Thanksgiving break. Once we get there everyone will be rejuvenated.

I learned a lot about integrating technology into teaching this week. My department started this program called key train this week. Its only incorporated into the U.S. History courses but it uses technology to get the kids ready for the ACT’s. We also use technology a lot to make teaching history to different types of learners. We use different things from webquests to videos and interactive games to teach our kids history. We use technology in our classrooms everyday for teaching history through PowerPoint’s, videos and projecting images that we would have otherwise had to make 30+ copies of before things like ELMO’s.

I have planned the use of WebQuests in my lessons, and research online for my students. I’ve used interactive games that are solely based out of technology with my students to help them review for tests. I’ve taught them and showed my students helpful resources that allow them do things like cite papers correctly. I use technology almost every day in my classes. I will continue to do these things but also learn as much as I can about the other technology that is out there that I could potentially use in my classroom.

As for my goals:

1. Treating every class like it’s a new and wonderful class, works unless the class before gave me a really hard time. I’ve found that stopping and praying and taking sometime in the five minutes I have between classes helps me reprepare myself for the next class.
2. I did plan two lessons this week where I needed my co-operating teacher to help me co-teach. I think he feels a bit uncomfortable helping me co-teach because I planned these lessons. He acted more like my aide then a co-teacher. I think next time I will try to include him in the planning. If he has time to be included in that process.
3. I did talk to my cooperating teacher about improving my assessments and we also had a team meeting about improving our assessments. I found that making sure each objective we are given to teach should be tested equally. I also found out that the test review has to be written carefully so as not to contaminated the validity of the test.
4. Healthy eating is going well. I found that with a student teaching schedule I have more of a schedule for eating which makes it easier to eat healthy.
5. I need to find more time to just spend with God. I think that will help keep me grounded in him.
6. Its been nice focusing on the positive students but I still find the students who are struggling take up more of my time. I’ve been making a point to talk to my positive students and asking them how their day has been going. I do this with my students who need more help too but I just want to make sure I’m connecting with my students who are doing well.
7. My new goal this week is to plan a lesson that has the students using technology to learn.
8. My second goal this week is to learn more about the technology available to us at the school I’m student teaching at. 

Please pray that I continue to get better student teaching and that the upcoming Thanksgiving break rejuvenates me.
~Abby

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 

Observation and Normality

If I had to describe my week in one word this time, I would have to say it was normal. I knew what to expect out of the week. My students and I have our relationships set. Lesson plans have been going well. I have timing down pretty well now and I was observed and even that went well. I feel like I’m finally getting the hang of this teaching thing.

I’m nearing the end of my full time teaching period and I have to say that all the rules and professional responsibilities are still overwhelming. I’ve been doing my best to make sure that I’ve been following school policy and procedures. I know that I’ve done a good job respecting the boundaries of professional responsibility when it comes to working with my students, colleagues and families. Its hard to keep up with all the expectations that a teacher has on their shoulders but I feel my cooperating teacher has done a nice job helping me. I feel the hardest lesson I’ve had to learn about following codes of professional conduct and legal directives is with my student in Government. The school is so worried about getting sued that even though I did everything right and followed the rules put in place perfectly. They still want my cooperating teacher in the room at all times.

For my students with disabilities or students who are struggling in my class our referral process is actually RTI. I have done this with several students in each of my classes. Some students just need to work on turning in homework, but other students need extra help on tests and quizzes. I have college bound juniors and seniors in my psychology classes so most of them don’t need interventions. My government class is a different story. Some of them are not going to graduate. Some of them need interventions because of absences. My job in the referral process is to find the main cause of the problem with the individual student and work on that with them. I have to document the steps I take, so the next teacher can pick up where I left off.

One of the main strong points that I found interesting in Schmidt’s chapter on social justice, is that students aren’t expected to leave their lives at the classroom door. From what I’ve learned this semester thus far, its important to channel my students life experiences to help them make connections to what they are learning. Schmidt really reinforces that idea in this chapter. Schmidt tells us that we should be working our students up about social justice issues and this is something that I’ve seen really works. I have found that my students remember the material better when they get worked up about it and form their own ideas and opinions about these issues. The last point I really liked from this chapter was that I should have my students doing more projects that fit with the curriculum goals that also include a social justice issue. I read a lot of great ideas in this chapter that I’m excited to try in my government class.

As for my goals this week;

1. Treating every class like it’s a new class and new day is still going to need some work but I think I’m doing much better at it.
2. Lately I’ve been really homesick so I cant wait until Thanksgiving to see my parents but for this week instead of a social life goal, I’m going to make it a goal that I find time to study for both my tests I have to take on Saturday.
3. Healthy eating goes away when I get stressed and I can feel that stress building again.
4. I’m reminded every day about my dependence on God. I just need to trust that he is going to bring me through the next couple years (hopefully without ulcers).
5. I’m staying sane by focusing on the students that are trying to learn and be a positive impact to my classroom. It’s those students that deserve over 100 percent from me and I can’t let them down.
6. Applying for jobs this week, getting letters of recommendation from my professors and studying for my APT test and psychology content area test.
7. I’ve been very happy with the quality of my lessons. I need to continue to work on and make sure that my lessons are reaching all the different learning styles of my students.
8. I’m staying positive, even when it seems like life is about to crash down around me. J
9. Catching psychology up did not happen this past week so I’m going to have to work on it this week.
10. My new goal for this week is to continue to form new and deeper relationships with students I haven’t yet. I feel that forming these relationships is a strong talent that I have and it does improve my students well being in my classroom.

 Other things that have happened this week include: getting observed. It went as well as i think it could have gone with my eighth period. I was given a lot of great suggestions that I have already started to implement. 

Please keep me and my students in your prayers for this week, 

~Abby

Power loss and parent teacher conferences

Surprising, that is my word that describes this week. My students, the weekly schedule, the shift in how my week was going, my students’ responses to material, and my government class. All of these things surprised me this week. My students were full of tests again this week in psychology; I am blaming this on the new quarter. I did not let their tests change the dynamics of my classroom and held strong to my discipline policy. The weekly schedule was surprising because it was not only changed up for parent teacher conferences but it was also changed up when the school lost power. I was teaching my sixth period psychology class when the school lost power and they lost focus in everything we were doing in class. It took me quite a bit of time to get them back to focusing on the assignment. All of my students really seemed to have needed hour in a half because everyone in the building came back the next day refreshed and ready for a new day. My government class even threw me for a spin when they actually paid attention and buckled down to learn this week. I felt that this week was a much better week then last week but full of surprises. The last bit of surprise I got was the parents of my students. A lot more of them showed up then what was originally anticipated by the school and teachers. I had a lot of parents who were so encouraging and others who have me so much invaluable experience. I was surprised at how easy it was to talk with my parents about their children. 

During this past week I’ve really been thinking about how to improve my lesson plans to include more things like problem solving, performance skills, scaffolding, questioning and even improving on how I set my lesson goals. I was reflecting on how I do those things now. I have the students to problem solving by giving them a situation and from what they know already solving that problem. I do this with readings and questions on the board. I have my students work on performance skills a lot. As soon as my students learn something new they are practicing it. Then I have them show me how well they learned in questions of the day, in the next class period and on projects. In psychology there is very little background knowledge so asking what my students already know is my way of assessing what they know and finding out what I can build on. I ask my students a lot of questions throughout my lessons because I want them to stay involved, I want them to form their own opinions and I want them to start thinking like a psychologist would about the issues we are talking about in class. I use questioning every day but I am still working on higher order thinking questions.

The hook in my lesson plan can be anything from review to introducing the lesson. It’s extremely important to my lessons because it gets my students prepared to start working. It gets their brains working to remember what they know and write what they know. It also improves their writing skills. For instance the hook I just used on Friday in my psychology class promoted class discussion on whether dreams have any real meaning. Without that time to think, reflect, and share with fellow classmates I don’t think my students would be as into the topic as they were on Friday. 

For students with learning disabilities in my classroom I do a lot of repeating what I wrote on the board. I also use skeleton outlines for lecture and I do frequent checks for understanding. It depends on the individual student but I know the students with learning disabilities and who need extra help. I also do a lot of talking to the student on a one on one basis to make sure things made sense and to make sure I am giving them all the accommodations they need.

The lesson I taught this week that brings to mind all these different areas in the lesson plans I’ve been working on is a lesson I taught on Tuesday. It was a lesson over nature versus nurture. This is a concept most of my students are not familiar with but it is a concept they still have an opinion on. So what I did was introduce it with have my students fill out in their own opinion if things like intelligence, body build, being a talented athlete, etc. were more inherited or more environmental. They had to fill out a chart giving a percentage to in each category telling me how much they thought the human trait was affected by environment and hereditary. Then I had my students get with partners and discuss their answers. Their groups then had to fill out another chart with their compromise on each topic. I went over what is included in nature and nurture but by then my students had a very strong grasp on the ideas. They also had very strong opinions. While my students were discussing these issues I went around the room and put groups back on topic by playing devil’s advocate. I also had to be the mediator for some groups who were getting a little more heated about their debates over nature and nurture. Each class was different and each class had different responses and questions for me over the debate. I answered my students questions to the best of my ability but also just allowed each of my classes to form their own opinion over the issue.

In another lessons on Friday I adapted the general curriculum to meet the special and diverse learning needs of my students. Instead of talking about how dreams can be interpreted I gave my students the assignment of writing down their dreams for a week. Next Friday we are going to interpret their own dreams. This is not only going to make it more real for my students but it’s going to make it more personal to them.  I do this a lot in my lesson plans but I am not the only one that does. I can see that the other teachers in my school also not only adapt the general curriculum to their students but they also every year adapt their own lesson plans to their new students.

As for my list of goals for myself; here they are, updates and new ones all thrown into one.

1. My government class has calmed down a little. I’m going to work on be happy and treating that class like each day is a new day.
2. My social life is balancing out quite well. I think I’m getting the hang of everything finally.
3. I’m still stressed out and that ice cream I bought yesterday does not help my healthy eating habits.
4. My relationship with God continues to strengthen especially when I see that I need him every day.
5. Keeping sane still includes staying and focusing on the positives.
6. Still study away for tests in November but also seriously thinking about where I’m going to be in the next few months.
7. Being the best teacher I can be means coming through with quality lessons for my students.
8. Staying positive went well this week. It helped with the shortened days and great parent teacher conferences.
9. Catching my psychology class up to where they are supposed to be went pretty good this past week. It wasn’t as fun as I would have liked but we are almost back on track. This will continue to be a goal for this week.
10. Collaborating with other teachers went pretty well this past week. They really helped me get ready for parent teacher conferences and they had a lot of good advice for me this past week. I want to continue to work on getting great ideas from them. I will see how they promote critical thinking, and problem solving.

If you could be continuing to pray for me this week that would be wonderful, I have decided to get observed in government this week and that is my hardest class. Please pray it goes well and not only will I be able to prove that I’m improving as a teacher but also have my professor give me some great tips on how to improve that class as a whole.

~Abby

The Little Engine That Could

Tough, that is my week in one word. Despite working so hard at being the best teacher I can be sometimes outside factors can rattle you. I had another very rough week and it wasn’t helped by the fact that I am now extremely homesick and I’m more stressed out then I have ever been in my life. I feel like I just need one day to sit and do nothing but that is just not possible. I heard a saying about teachers once and that was their work was never done, and it’s not. If I manage to catch up on grading, I have something more to grade by the end of my day. There is always more lesson planning to do and of course reflecting on the lessons I’ve already taught. I don’t mean to complain, I am just feeling very overwhelmed.

This past week I learned something huge. I learned that collaboration equals consistency for students. My school has several initiatives its been working on and the tardy policy is one of them. All the teachers have been in meetings about how to decrease the tardies before and during school, but this is the first year they’ve really stuck to their guns about initiating the policy with every teacher. They’ve announced it to the students and they come around and make sure that the teachers are following procedure. This collaboration has significantly reduced tardies.

I’ve learned a lot about collaboration since I’ve started student teaching. I learned that the more teachers and administrators collaborate, the better school environment you provide to your students. With a school as big as Eisenhower this collaboration is crucial. Teachers and staff all over need to know what is expected out of them but also what is expected out of their students. This collaboration doesn’t just stop with the staff at Eisenhower. Through department meetings and our curriculum director we can collaborate with the other high schools in our district. Every week we get together twice to work on developing an effective learning climate in our department for our students. I’ve already been able to help on developing what our homework policy should be as a department for the whole district.

So far my relationship with parents/guardians has been to help my students what my expectations are for them. When I can’t get through to my student that they need to be trying harder in my class, getting work in on time, etc, then I talk to the parents. Most of my communication has been through email but this week is parent teacher conferences and I am interested to see what that is like. I do most of my communication with my students though. I am pretty good with developing relationships with my students and most of my students I know really well now.

Another collaborative thing I’m good at is co-planning/ co-teaching with my aide, cooperating teacher and other social studies teachers. Its encouraged to talk to other teachers about how they teach a subject, and the teachers at my school are all to willing to share their ideas. I am always showing my cooperating teacher things I plan to do or asking him advise on the best plan of action. He helps be plan the right way to introduce something and he also helps me find a better way to teach something. With my aide I am constantly making sure that I am planning for the needs of all my students.

I’m still in need of finding the strength to continue with this experience. I love my students and I love everything I’m learning and I absolutely love teaching. I just feel like I’m at my breaking point. I feel like I’m not good enough to teach these kids yet. I’m in constant worry that my students won’t learn what they are supposed to because of me. So I’m in need of encouragement this week.

Last week I set a goal to be a better writer for my students. I’m keeping that goal but this goal really showed my students that even though I have gone to college and am now teaching them, I still struggle with some academic things. They really do appreciate being open and honest with them.

My goals for this week;

1. Get government class to calm down enough to be enjoyable. I’m sick of dreading that class every day.
2. My social life can take a hike for all I care this week. This weekend wore me out and now I think I’m getting sick.
3. Eating healthy got better this week and with that I am surprised. It probably helps that I’m stressed to my breaking point and when I’m that stressed I don’t want to eat. So what I do eat tends to be healthy.
4. My relationship with God improved this week. My friend who got married Saturday needed him so much this weekend to stay calm. God used me to help keep her calm but also to remind her that he was there for her. And now after writing these words I realize that God just reminded me that he is always there for me as well. J
5. Keeping my sainity this week will be hard and I’m going to say that I just need to set my sights on God and stay positive.
6. Studying for my tests in November is a top priority now.
7. Being the best teacher I can be, this week is going to be figuring out how to relieve some of the stress in my life.
8. I failed at staying positive this past week but every day, every week, every class period is new and I can start fresh.  
9. A new goal I have for this week is too collaborate more with the other teachers in the building.
10. My second and probably semi-permanent goal for the week is too catch my students back up to where we need to be. Projects last week took longer than expected for both classes. 

Please have me in your prayers this week, 

~Abby

Frustrated and Optimistic

Frustrated that is my one word that could summarize this entire week. I was frustrated with my government students my 3^rd period students and myself. I thought hey I’m finally getting the hang of this but no I’m still struggling. I was getting observed this week and a lesson that went fine in my 2^nd period went horribly awry in my 3^rd period which happened to be the period I was being observed in. My supervisor was awesome and gave me some helpful comments about reflecting and trying to figure out what was different and what I could change. I still felt horrible about the observation. I just wanted to prove that I had improved as much as I felt I’d improved. In the past couple weeks. Well I started to breath after my observation and tried to relax and when my 6^th period walked in I forced myself to be happy they were there. They are perceptive students and I love that period anyway. So about two minutes into the period I was happy they were there and they had me smiling again faster than I could have done.

I was still feeling pretty negative about student teaching so the next day I made a list of positive things about myself and student teaching. I also had my facebook friends help me. It really did help and I stayed positive rather then sink further into a depressive mood. So on the note of staying positive I will tell you my strengths before I tell you my weaknesses in this past week.

Well my strengths when it comes to the rules of English, grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization and syntax are limited. On the positive side because I have struggled so much on this subject I’m very good at teaching different learning strategies to my diverse learners. As a result of my struggles in this area I can empathize with my students. I am also open and honest with them about this area in which I struggle and they can see that everyone struggles at something. As a result of my struggles in this area I make sure that I’m not always making my students do written work and I’m giving my students diverse teaching activities that a meet the diverse learners in my classroom.

A positive that I do have is I’m pretty good at expressing ideas orally. I’m good at coming up with explanations my students can learn from and that apply to my students. I practice what I’m going to say in my classes and work on my examples ahead of time so I can express ideas clearly. Another positive about me as a teacher in the classroom is I do listen well to my students. When my students ask questions or answer a question one thing I do is restate or summarize what they have asked me to help my other students understand. This also tells the student that I’ve heard them correctly and that their questions or contribution was a good one. This also helps because a lot of my students have a problem with understanding English or speaking English clearly. I have a lot of English as a second language students and when I restate the question or even repeat directions I’m giving it allows my students time to fully understand what is being said.

It’s important for me to be a good model when it comes to effective reading, writing, speaking and listening. My college supervisor and I have talked about the writing aspect in my classroom because this is a huge struggle for me. I am a terrible speller and it shows even though I don’t want it too. It’s important that I’m making sure that if I make a mistake I let my class know I’ve realized this mistake. If I forget how to spell something it’s okay to ask if someone knows. As for the other effective communication skills I can show this by reading to my students more and continuing to be a good speaker and listener.

When it comes to my classroom I learned by reading Schmidt that students may have trouble getting that first sentence or even word on paper. They may have so much to say but don’t really know how to write it on paper. Having my students talk about what they want to write down might be better than having them write the information down and then talking about it. I also learned from reading Schmidt that I don’t have to be a great writer to enjoy the writing process as a teacher. I can improve my skills as a writer in the classroom while I’m improving my students writing skills. I’ve seen just by teaching my students to break down words to decipher the meaning I am also improving my vocabulary and writing skills. I also learned from my reading this week that I need to be using more primary documents in all of my classes. Students are naturally curious and from my experience with past lessons the students like those lessons better. Another thing I found myself interested in doing and what I have been doing with my students is recreating the past. I could do this more with psychology and the experiments down in psychology and government has already done a lot of recreating. We recreated our need for federalism, and our need for a constitution. I am thinking of ideas to recreate our need for the two branches in congress for the upcoming week.

As for my goals this week

1. I’ve got almost all my government kids names out of necessity. There are only a few I forget.
2. My social life revolves around school and the wedding. I’m so excited for next weekend but it put a lot of stress on getting work down this weekend.
3. Eating healthy returns but not with a vengeance. I need to work on eating better. I’m going to get sick if I don’t.
4. My relationship with God continues to grow because I’m constantly reminded of my reliance on him during this trying time in my life. I’ve recently set up bible verses to come to my phone every morning and Its really helping set my sights on God every day.
5. Sanity this next coming week is going to focus on making me stay positive.
6. Job hunt… I need to get those letters of recommendation forms out to my professors. Oh and study for my two tests in November.
7. I worked on being consistent and I am finding what best practices work with which classes.
8. I’ve found that it’s really hard to predict what questions my students are going to ask and getting back to them with a more complete answer is better and easier.  
9. I’m adding a new permanent goal into this list of goals. That is to stay positive and to stay the person I know I am.
10. Another goal is to get better at writing in front of my students, but also show my students how I’m working on becoming a better writer.

Please pray for a more calm and stress free week for me,

Abby

Here is my art project to remind me to be optimistic. Thank you Jodie for reminding me that I need to be optimistic

Prioritizing

My teaching experience in the past week has been comforting. I’m finally beginning to see how much I’ve learned and that I can be a great teacher, I just need to continue to work hard. Before this week I was worried I wasn’t good enough. I was worried that by trying to become a teacher I would just harm my future students. I was watching all these other amazing teachers and just praying I could be like them and was mad at myself for not being that good. This week it finally set in that If I work hard and always put my students best interest first then I will eventually become an amazing teacher. I had a classroom full of students tell me I was already a good teacher without any prompting so it’s starting to really dawn on me. I was right in following God’s path for me; teaching is what I was meant to do.

The first thing I want to address today is my students’ lack of prior knowledge in both my subjects. In psychology I expected a good lacking in my students prior knowledge but I did expect there to be a lot of prior knowledge for my students in Government. I can’t believe that after all the classes my students are required to take before Government that they wouldn’t know more than they actually do. Another area of concern I have is that my students have a lot of misconceptions about both my topics. All my students know about Psychology is what they see on TV and for Government they barely know more than that. I’ve found that not only am I trying to connect the lesson with what they see on TV or in real life but I have to correct the misconceptions they have learned from TV.

This week I taught a lesson in Government that used a lot of different ways to teach my students key ideas. I did this with a child’s story book and a graphic novel on the constitution. But I also had my students come up with examples from their experiences. In this lesson I was teaching the reasons for Government that are found in the Constitution. This was an important issue for my students to understand because many of them don’t really see a need for government. They consider any kind of law or law enforcement bad. I wanted them to really understand without government our lives would be chaos. In this lesson I read the children’s book to my students. I didn’t know exactly how they would respond to it because; I was reading a children’s book to them. They loved it and I think it is because the book used simple words and my students could understand it because they didn’t have to read it themselves. For a lot of my students English is their second language. The graphic novel chapter still had a lot of words in it but it had pictures to help my students understand what was going on.

In psychology I try different ways to incorporate real world experiences into the material and for this class it feels much easier. Now that I’m moving on to the brain and biology behind psychology its going to be harder to connect it to my students in the real world but easier to connect it to what my students are and have learned in science. For this chapter I’m constantly checking to see what my students already know and if they know something already I ask them and relate it back to their science classes.

As for my goals this week

1.      I am still working on learning my government kids names.

2.      My social life is kind important right now seeing as my friend is getting married in two weeks so all those pre-wedding activities are really picking up. I just have to make sure school is really still coming first. My students are too important to not come first. It’s all about prioritizing.

3.      Eating healthy flew out the window with pre-wedding activities but I’m working on it.

4.      My relationship with God is stronger than ever because there is no way I would get through this experience without his support constantly.

5.      Sanity (crossing fingers) is returning, even though life is staying busy.

6.      Being the best teacher I can be is not only developing better relationships with my students but also making sure they are respecting me as well.

7.      For the job hunt to begin I need to figure out where I want to go in life. But I’m working towards passing all my tests and fixing my resume.

8.      Communicating more effectively in front of my students is going well. It was suggested in a workshop I went to last week that I should be real with my students and so I’m trying that. It seems to be working well.

9.      Being consistent is a challenge for me right now because I want to find the best practices that work with my students. I am going to continue to work on this for the upcoming week.

10.  Another goal I want to work on is being better prepared to answer my student’s questions about the curriculum. My students are very interested in what they are learning but there are several questions they asked this week that I didn’t know the answer too. I want to try to learn to prepare for those questions. 

I'm being observed this week again so please pray that goes well, 

Abby

Information and Communication

If I had to describe this past week in one word it would be informative. This week not only did I get to know my students better but I also went to my first teachers’ in-service conference. At this conference teachers from the three district high schools presented on how they do best practices as teachers. I went to two and learned a lot about the Socratic method and motivating students. I also learned a lot about the different cultures in my classroom. My students learned a lot this past week as well, but if there is one thing my psychology students will take from our Friday class, its that Miss. Doesn’t like snakes.

I learned this week that communication with my students isn’t just verbal and it isn’t just in the classroom. Saying hi to my students in the hall way and using their names makes them feel like they aren’t just one in the crowd of students in a classroom. Another way I communicate with my students is to thank them by name for staying on task in my classroom. I’ve started to do this because it was suggested as one of the ways to get the students not working motivated to work. This along with marking their paper with a highlighter pen has been working extremely well in my government class. When I mark on my students paper with a highlighter pen it indicates to me that they were working with the time I gave to them when that paper gets handed in. That mark will go towards a participation grade. This new system I implemented about a two weeks ago has really been helping getting my students’ motivated to use their time wisely.

Now, I use non-verbal communication as much as I use verbal. This is especially true when my students need to stop talking and switch their focus back to me. The most effective way I have found to get my students to stop their own conversations and focus on me is to stop talking, sometimes turn off the lights, and wait until they refocus on me. Many of my students will do the quieting down for me and as my cooperating teacher says. The louder I get the louder my classroom gets and eventually I’m going to end up losing my voice and I will continue to have the problem. So I started simply just standing and waiting. It works pretty good. Another way I have been nonverbally communicating with my students is a smile when they walk in or as I’m circulating the classroom. I also go and simply stand next to my talkers or interrupters. They hate it but they get the message loud and clear.

My students in both my government and psychology classes have gotten many different opportunities to communicate with me and each other; verbally, non- verbally and written. Their notebooks are the main source for this communication. Most everything they share with me and the class they write in those notebooks. Once they write their answer to a question of the day or a question I ask them during class; I have several students share their answers with the class. Often times I have my students share with a partner as well. Both psychology and government have now had experience writing information down that they themselves have gone out and found. They have also experienced presenting that information to the class. They don’t like it much but they just need to practice.

One thing I do a lot as a teacher is listen. When I ask a question I am listening to how my students are relating the information to their lives. I also am listening and assessing how well my students understood a concept. I do a lot of listening when my students are in groups. Often times I’ve found myself solving little conflict issues my students have run into. The main way I’ve been listening this week is students who are talking to me before or after class about issues in their lives. I have been making it a point to talk to the students who are not themselves or are not participating the way they should and see what’s going on in their lives. This past week two of my students were gone for more than one day. They were both in the hospital. Effectively communicating with them involved being sympathetic but also gaining from them the best way to help them succeed now that they were back in my classroom. I also learned that my students are more accountable if they know I’m going to ask them how they are if their head is down or if they miss class. They don’t really like to lie to my face so I get much better behavior just by making sure I’m communicating with my students.

So far the last huge way I’ve been communicating with my students is feedback on handed in assignments and questions answered in class. The work I give my students to do is work that I can give them a lot of feedback on. Their assignments usually have red ink on it no matter if its excellent quality or poor quality. When they answer questions in class I pull out the parts of their answer that were right and I work with the students on finding all the right parts to that answer.

As for my goals this week:

1.      I know for sure I have my students names in psychology but now I really need to work on Government. 

2.      I have determined that my social life really isn't important in this phase of life, right now I need to focus on school and getting through this experience. I'm sure my friends will understand. 

3.      Grading took up most of my Friday and it takes up a lot of my time during the week but hey I got through 95 journals on Friday before I left school so I didn't have to tote them home and back. The only problem was I was at school Friday till 8pm. :( 

4.      Eating healthy flew out the window this past week but hey today is a fresh start. 

5.      My relationship with God is going well, I can see him working in my students lives and I'm glad he loves them as much as he loves me. 

6.      Sanity is really a fluid thing I would say, or at least I hope.

7.      Being the best teacher I can be, continues to include developing better relationships with my students, but also includes getting better at using best practices. 

8.      Job hunt, where to even begin, where do I even want to teach?

9.      Incorporating my aide is harder then I thought it would be because she is not as motivated to be incorporated as I thought she would be. 

10.  I did very well at using real world scenarios in each class. My students will not forget the bystander affect, or the main elements to attitude for a long time. :)

11. My new goal for this week is to communicate more effectively with my students when I am in front of the classroom. 

12. My second goal is one I learned about at the teacher fair for our in-service day. That is I want to be real with my students. This includes staying consistent and being open with them about who I am and what I expect from them. 

I think that is it for now, 

~Abby

Homecoming Week!

My teaching experience this week went pretty well. If I had to sum up my teaching experience for this week in one word; I would have to say that word would be hyperactivity. I say hyperactivity because my kids were hyper this week because it was spirit week. Their homecoming was Friday and the dance was on Saturday. Both my Wednesday and Thursday classes were cut short because of late start and the pep assembly. I can get awfully irritating to lose 16 minutes of class time in one week. Especially when the kids are so hyper it’s hard to steer them in any direction.

Luckily I wasn’t the only one facing the problem of hyperactivity in the classroom. My cooperating teacher also had to face this with his AP kids and my Aide in my government period was in on the ride with me. One of the things that I did to help make this last week better was I talked to other teachers about how they handled this week. I got tons of great advice and I implemented a lot of it.

Another thing I did a lot of this week was ask advice about how to better teach a subject and how to better modify my assignments to meet the needs of all my students. We share the social studies office with the special education teachers and they are always willing to give me advice about how to teach things better or how to better modify my assignments to meet the needs of all my students. A major question I had for my supervisor, which I forgot to ask him when he supervised me this week was; “How do you get the kids to higher order thinking when you can barely get them to follow directions.” Well I asked some of the special education teachers and they were very encouraging.

One thing I haven’t talked about is all the meetings, PLP’s and information that I’ve been getting from the experts and community at my school. They have a lot of great ideas to implement in my field and they remind the teachers of things that they should be doing and make sure that they are implementing good practicing techniques. I take a lot from these meetings and really try to implement what I’m learning in my classroom. The challenge is that they aren’t always thinking about the challenges that our individual students bring to the classroom. They especially forget our students’ lack of prior knowledge especially in the subject of Social Studies. I’ve heard other teachers mention how they are supposed to skim over the early part of American History because the students are supposed to already know that, but the problem is that they don’t.

A huge thing I learned in the past couple weeks of teaching is that I need to use authentic and real world problems in my lesson. This tends to be very easy for me in Psychology because it is easy to relate things back to the kids. We are learning about what makes them do the things we do. Of course I could always get better at making sure the examples fit my students better because that is important. In government this is a little harder. My students tend to bring up the real world problems in that class and as much as their examples sometimes scare me. For example, “what happens if I commit and murder in Illinois then go over to Indiana and commit a murder what will happen then can Illinois extradite me?” I really wanted to say don’t commit murders and you will be okay but I answered her question first before adding in but it would be much easier for you if you didn’t commit any murders.

After being observed a couple times now, if feel that I get better after every observation. My supervisor always has great things for me to improve on and ideas that will make my life easier in my classroom. I am constantly working on wasting as little time as possible in my classroom but I was also reminded this week by my supervisor that I need to make sure that I have my students’ full attention before I can move on in my teaching. This means that I might have to waste some time before I can move on.

In our education class we’ve been reading from Laurel Schmidts’ Classroom Confidential he has a lot of great ideas about communicating with parents and preparing for parent teacher conferences. What really helped me is when he talks about how my students culture can really affect my communications with the parents. I’ve communicated with a couple of my students’ parents already and we have had meet the teacher night already but we have not done parent teacher conferences. Schmidt says that it is important to get to know as much about my students culture as possible and I feel that I’ve really been able to do this especially in psychology. Another thing I’ve been trying to do with my parents is be proactive. If a student is struggling or not turning in assignments I first talk to the student but if that doesn’t solve anything then I email the parents. I learned that with a lot of my parents calling home doesn’t get me a call back most times. But emailing usually gets a response in less than a week. I think Schmidt’s ideas about being proactive and positive will help me really prepare for my first parent teacher conferences.

As for my goals this week:

1.      I’ve learned almost all of my students names and only occasionally forget. I’m still working on this with government.

2.      My social life is kind of nonexistent but with an upcoming wedding and all of its festivities I’m going to have to be careful about prioritizing.

3.      Grading went fine for this week it’s just a matter of getting all the late and retests in. Oh and all the late work students are turning in but I won’t complain about that. J

4.      Eating healthy continues, I now just have to remember to eat.

5.      My relationship with God is going good. I was mad at him for most of this week but he forgives me and we get stronger. Thank you for all your prayers for my observation, it did not go as well as I would have hoped but I got a lot more out of it then I would have if it did go well.

6.      Sanity is really a fluid thing I would say, or at least I hope.

7.      Being the best teacher I can be now finally includes developing better relationships with my students. Getting to know them more than just that initial ten percent.

8.      The principal panel this week gave me some better ideas about what I need to focus on when it comes to the job hunt.

9.      One of my new goals for this week is learning how to better incorporate my aide in government because she is a certified social studies teacher.

10.  Another goal is to get better at using real world scenarios with my students.