Prompt #1: “Write about 2 things that are going well in
your classroom that you are proud of.
Write about 2 things in your classroom that you wish to improve. What steps will you take to improve these
items?”
Prompt #1: After the first quarter of teaching, I am most
proud of the relationship I have built with some of my students in class. While
this is not the case for every student, there are at least a few students (or
one) in every class that is willing to respond to my questions. Compared to the
first two weeks of absolute silence, I feel like this is an indicator of some
progress. There have also been some moments in class where students have
checked each other for understanding, sometimes for the sake of competition.
Although these moments are brief, it still is heartening to see that light of
excitement in the classroom as students correct each other and show a sense of
urgency. As far as improvements, I have more than two things that I would like
to address. My biggest weakness is lesson planning, followed quickly by differentiated
instruction for students of varying levels of understanding. I walk in every
week with a skeleton of a plan and a whole plethora of contingency plans for
the worst case scenario. I don’t feel particularly attached to my plans when I
make them and if I think of something before the period starts, I scrap
everything and improvise the entire hour. This has created a variety of results
(most of them disastrous) and I don’t feel particularly confident each day when
I walk into the building. Even worse is coming home and feeling absolutely
exhausted, even though I feel like there are so many other things I need to
address. It’s like I can’t prioritize the things that will help me get out of
this vicious cycle of uncertainty. I have a large backlog of other demands that
have accumulated since I started teaching and it seems that every time I do
have some time to address these concerns, taking a break to maintain my sanity
takes precedence. I am determined to start planning backwards, starting first
with an end-of-the-year test and working backwards through summative and
formative assessments, eventually getting down to unit plans and lesson plans. My
goal was to have it finished by next weekend, but I have an obligation with
Teach for America that will eat up my entire Saturday then. Hopefully during
the week I’ll be able to plan ahead as far as I can so each weekend can be
spent with refining my ideas and feeling more prepared each day. To improve my differentiation
for students, I will be rearranging the classroom this week into groups based
on their test scores from my previous assessment on integer operations. Because
integer operations are crucial to the entire unit, I want to be able to focus
on helping these students during independent practice. If they’re seated
together, it’ll be easier to address them all together, in my opinion. I’m also
curious to see how they will respond to this arrangement, though. It could be a
terrible idea at the same time.
