Student Teaching Reflection 16

This week was very similar to last week. My mentor teacher is still out until Christmas break, so I am acting as teacher for all of her classes. This week went slightly smoother than last week, though, and the classes worked well when they were supposed to work. I think that this has a lot to do with the sub that is there on my days off of student teaching. Last week, the sub was not on top of the students to get their work done, and as a result, they did not do any work when I wasn't there. This week, my mentor teacher requested the building sub for the days I am not at school. He interacts with all of the high schoolers on a daily basis, gets to know all of them, and cares enough to push them to do their work. This helped me out a lot because the students were prepared when I came the next day. The one thing that stood out this week happened on Thursday. The early classes went smoothly, but the conceptual biology students struggled to stay on task and focused. While I was walking around helping the students with their work, I stopped at one student's desk and started asking him questions to guide him through his worksheet. He was not trying to answer any questions, and when I pushed, he told me that he didn't care about working on the questions and he would get the answers when we went over them as a group. I was at a loss and felt like it wasn't worth an argument, so I moved to help another student. I asked both my mentor teacher and her co-teacher (who was there at the time) how they would have handled it, and they both answered similarly. They both said that this was a time when they would have chosen their battles. Since these students are old enough to be responsible for themselves, sometimes a teacher needs to let them make their own decisions, even if that decision will negatively impact their learning. My mentor teacher said that she would have tried again the next day to get the student to engage and possibly remind the student that they are not helping themselves by waiting to get the answers when the teacher goes over it. I think that this apathetic mentality is something that affects a lot of the students in conceptual biology, and this will be my biggest challenge when teaching this class.

Student Teaching Reflection 15

This week was a crazy week for me at my internship. My mentor teacher broke her arm near her shoulder and is unable to come into work for at least 2 weeks. Because of this, I am the teacher this week and next on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday! I am still following her lesson plans, which takes some of the stress of this last-minute change off of me, but I am learning a lot about classroom management this week. For 4 periods of the day, her students are mainly honors students who care about their learning experience, work hard, and pay attention. This makes it easier on me, but even these classes are still not perfect. I have had some trouble with students talking while I am going over things or not working when they have time to work independently. For the other 2 periods, the students are a bit more unruly, but there is a co-teacher who has been taking the lead of the class. Overall, this week has been a very positive experience, if a bit anxiety-producing, and I have gained a lot of confidence. I have also gotten a lot more familiar with the students this week, so it has been nice to get to know more of them.

Student Teaching Reflection 14

This week was fairly uneventful, but my mentor teacher was out on Thursday. For the Conceptual Biology classes, this meant that her co-teacher took the lead that day, and it was nice for me to see a different style of teaching. She kept many things the same since she uses the same or similar lesson plans for her own conceptual biology class, but I was interested to see her use of exit tickets in this class. My mentor teacher had been out Wednesday and Thursday, and her co-teacher had taught the students about Punnett squares and inheritance patterns. As the exit ticket on Thursday, she had the students create a Punnett square for a specific scenario and tell her what percentage of the offspring would be a certain genotype. She had the students turn these slips in, but did not require them to put their names on them. Rather than use these exit tickets to assess the students, she used them to assess herself. She went through them to make sure the students were understanding the concepts to see if she needed to adjust her lessons. I thought that this was an excellent alternative use for formative assessments, and I think that it is something that I will adopt in my own teaching.