Blog 1

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.