Teaching Reflections

I taught daily in this practicum so this is just reflections from a few lessons which I taught during

the semester.

#1 January 16, 2019

Today was my first day teaching any groups and the first one was rocky. The students didn’t

know me very well, so they asked a lot of questions that did not pertain to the lesson and I had

a hard time deflecting them. I wanted the students to like me. The curriculum is scripted, and I

knew I didn’t have to follow it exactly, but I tried to it and it felt really awkward. I also do not

feel the student understood it when I spoke it the way it told me too. During the worksheet, I

had a hard time keeping each of the students from going ahead of where we had stopped if the

other wasn’t finished. I overall feel like I wasn’t as prepared as I would have wanted and can’t

wait to try again.

#2 January 23, 2019

Today was my first time teaching the second afternoon reading group. I quickly learned that

these students do not get along with each other all of the time and are very talkative. They

didn’t listen to me and I think it was because Ms. Peterson was gone. I was not an official sub

and they didn’t see me as a person of authority. They frequently asked where she was and

would not stay focused. We almost didn’t make it through the entire lesson because I could not

get them to pay attention. I want to work on building relationships with these students because
I want to be able to effectively teach them. My goal from this is to watch Ms. Peterson handle

their group and learn how to keep them under control.

#3 February 6, 2019

I have been teaching a girl in her own individual reading group. She is a little farther behind the

others in her group, so I have been working with her one on one. At first it was rocky. She does

not seem to comprehend some of the things that I say to her and spaces out easily. She also can

become defiant if she does not want to work. But it is an uphill battle and today I felt

accomplished in that. We started with reading practice and then moved to the computer

activity associated with the lesson. Normally during the reading she tries to pull at the papers or

talk to me about subjects which are unrelated. Today she simply complied and did so to each of

my prompts to stay focused. After the computer she had to do worksheets which typically she

grumbles through and just circles random things. I asked her to read everything aloud to me

and tell me if she needs help. For one of the first times, she told me she needed help and we

worked out the question together. It was amazing.

#4 February 11, 2019

Today was rough. We had a student with a lot of behaviors in the classroom at Linden Park. It

became so disruptive that Ms. Peterson handed her reading group over to me and sent us into

the hall with clipboards. I had never taught this group before and was thrown in mid-lesson. I
stumbled to catch up to what I was supposed to be doing and we had to make the transition

into the hallway. This put us behind time. However, the hallway proved to be distracting with

many students passing by and trying to talk to mine. One student kept coming out to tell his

classmate what he was missing inside the classroom. I tried hard to keep them on task but they

were often looking around the hallways or giggling about something. We ended up not getting

through the whole lesson. I think it was a mix of too many variables that made this happen:

switching to an unfamiliar teacher, moving settings, being in a distracting setting, peers trying

to communicate and discomfort of sitting on the ground.

#5 February 22, 2019

Teaching our second to last math group of the day can be a challenge. One of our boys is very

high energy with ADHD and I cannot keep him under control sometimes. I tried hard today to

do so. The math group started fine but as soon as I asked him to focus, he began to pout and

look away from me. I pulled out a white board to do tallies and only when I started to take one

away did he begin working again. Sometimes he would defy me and tell me to just take it away

but then I would take two and he would be upset enough to begin working. We went through

all his tallies and he did not get his dollar for the day. He was upset with me but I told him we

could try harder tomorrow. The rest of the group listened well and did their work despite his

antics. The only problem was that me trying to focus on his behavior slowed us down and

prevented us from getting as far as we could have.