At the end of my second week, I can say I feel more comfortable at the school and feel a part of it. Last week I felt like an outsider just visiting but now I think the students view me as another one of their teachers. I've had a great time getting to know them and connecting with them. In the computer applications class, my co-op and I gave the students an "about me" PowerPoint assignment. We wanted to first of all see how well the students know PowerPoint and figure out what we actually need to teach them about it. We also gave them this assignment just to get to know them better-the class is mostly freshmen and it's a semester course so my co-op just meet them this week as well. Their skills pretty much blew us out of the water, we underestimated how much they know how to do in PowerPoint. It was like they had already taken the course!
At the beginning of the week on Monday, teachers had an in-service day. The school district is a part of the Learning Focused program and the in-service was all day training for it. No one seemed to be looking forward to it. I was interested to see what was involved with it, if what we had been learning in our educational classes matched up to what the training was. For the most part, everything in the training involved strategies I had heard of at some point from previous professors. However too much was thrown into one day, the teachers quickly lost interest because the trainer from the Learning Focused program was very elementary oriented. She didn't apply it to high school content very well. I have to say so myself that it was a long day. I think the day would have been much more worthwhile if it would have been only a half day of training then have the teachers collaborate with the others in their department as to how they will implement the strategies they had just heard about.
As for changing anything about this past week, everything went well so I don't feel I would need to change. The only thing that I'm struggling a bit with is learning the students' names. I have a terrible memory and just can't seem to remember who's who. It'll come though!
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I feel exactly how you did this previous week - I am starting to feel completely comfortable in the classroom and feel the same around the students. I also had the students make a power point presentation to describe what their interests are and had them print it out afterwards. It really helped me be able to get to know the students along with remembering their names with what they enjoy doing.
ReplyDeleteThat is so neat you got to learn about your new class coming in, its funny (but not totally suprising) that they knew the matierial already! It seems there are a lot of studetns out there who already know so much of the content.
ReplyDeleteIn my school however, studetns in 9th grade are just doing keyboarding for the first time! They know the technology content but do not know how to type.
Learning Focused schools is a very popular program in today's schools and getting a lot of attention from education scholars. Going into a teaching interview talking about your experience with that program will definitely make you stand out!
ReplyDeleteThere are many teachers that look at in-service days in a negative way. However, it (professional development) is an important part of our career as professionals. Thank goodness doctors continue to go back and learn the newest methods and medicine in treating their patients.
We, as teachers, need to remember our obligation to our students, parents (taxpayers), school board, and administrators when we have professional development opportunities that are free and right at our doorstep! ;) Why not take every opportunity to make yourself a better teacher!