Student Teaching Reflection 10

This week I observed and assisted with several notable things. The first was in my mentor teacher's Anatomy and Physiology class. During their class this week, the students were strengthening their knowledge of their current unit with lab stations. My mentor teacher placed 12 stations around the room that corresponded with different activities in a lab packet. Some examples of activities were to label the bones in an adult skull model, put together an x-ray of a full skeleton and label it, and use balloons to model the fluid in joints. The students traveled around the room in small groups at their own pace and completed the activities. Some activities, like the x-ray activity, required a teacher to sign off once they completed it, and others were independent. As I traveled around the room helping students and observing their work, I was impressed with the discussions I heard and the work that I saw. The students were very engaged in these activities and clearly working hard at it. I like the design of this type of activity, because the students were able to go at their own pace. Because of that, there was no down time or time to get off track. There were also several lab activities that could be completed in the packet without a station, so if all of the stations were full, students were still working. I also liked that this type of activity was very independent for the students. It ran over several days, so the students would come in and get straight to work. The students took responsibility for their learning.

This week, I also observed how my mentor teacher grades projects. I was not able to assist her with this grading because it was in her Project Lead the Way class, but I got to see how she sets up her rubrics. Her rubric is slightly different from the kind that I usually see. Her rubric had three sections across: Directions, points, and grade. In the first column, she copied and pasted the directions that she had given her students. These directions were itemized in the rubric. In the next column was how many points each direction was worth, and in the final column, she wrote their grade. She then wrote a description of why points were taken off under the directions. I liked some parts of this rubric, but there are other parts I would change. The first thing I liked was that the directions on the rubric were exactly the same as the directions that were given to the students. I also liked how she itemized the rubric. All of the sections were worth 2-6 points, and many were either the student included it or they didn't. However, she didn't specify on the rubric how many points would be taken off for certain discrepancies and the rubric only described what would be included in an exemplary projects, unlike a regular rubric. Overall, I might consider using a similar rubric in the future, but with some variations.