When developing my practicum plan, I developed three main learning goals. I felt that the three were very important for me to grow as an educator. The first goal was organization. I felt that I was unorganized with my education assignments (lesson plans etc) and needed to become organized better. To do this, I created a binder with my assignments, classroom handouts, lesson plans and any thing else I feel will help me with my growth as a teacher.
Another learning goal I had was clasroom management. During the fall, I felt that I did not have great classroom management and needed to work on this. To do this, I have used methods from Education 401. Also, being in the classroom more often has allowed me to gain more respect and have better classroom management, as the students have gotten more respect and familiar with me.
My final goal was time management. This was important to me because during the fall I created lessons that did not take up the entire period. I have been extremely successful with creating lessons that last an entire period. I have discussed this with my teacher (the most out of the 3 learning goals) and he has helped me with various worksheets and ideas to extend the lesson for the full period. Being in the school longer and creating more lessons this semester than previous semesters has allowed me to understand how in depth and long my lesson plans should be. I feel that I have learned the most from creating this goal and it has helped me the most as well.
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Dave,
ReplyDeleteAfter reading through your blog, I noticed we had very similar learning goals in our practicum plan. I think that many student teachers express the same concerns while going through their first couple of years. We are still very young, and it is difficult to gain the respect that we want to demand in front of the classroom. Also, knowing how to manage a classroom is not something you immediately develop – it takes time inside and outside of the classroom. It sounds as if you are making a lot of progress, though, which is great. I think that this semester has also been the one that has helped me define my classroom management style. I, like you, struggled with taking control of a classroom last semester. I think that the increase of time is one reason we are able to more effectively define ourselves as authority figures in the classroom.
I think that time management is something I am constantly working on, as well. I find that it is hard in mathematics to determine whether or not students will find the lesson difficult. We may be able to get through equations of lines in 20 minutes, or it might take two days. This makes planning ahead somewhat difficult. I see now, though, that this is a common problem among all subjects. I wonder what we could do to somewhat “test” the lesson before we teach it to see how long it will take. Maybe this will help us…
Glad to see we are both trying to stay more organized this semester. Good luck continuing to make progress on your practicum plan and learning more about yourself as an educator.