I'm writing this as I sit in my classroom on Monday. It's been an extremely boring day as each class is working on their long-term projects and finishing up their reviews before a chapter test tomorrow. There is also one class finishing up "Gettysburg" movie. So I feel comfortable posting about my highlights and such this week.
Friday was a pretty awesome day. I had my supervisor come in to watch my lesson and I recorded myself to create the presentation for a few weeks from now. The lesson I had observed was about the Gettysburg Address. In short, I had them re-write the speech for themselves, sentence by sentence, and see if we could address the same themes and topics that Lincoln wrote about in November 1863. The supervisor was astounded at how well I worked with the class. He said my voice was great, in that when I needed to be louder, I just got louder but didn't sound mean. The students were engaged in their groups as they re-wrote their sentences and I got a lot of participation when I asked for the themes/topics. The Supervisor said the lesson really grew on him and he got caught up with what was going on; not a typical situation for such an experienced teacher/evaluator. As we talked about the lesson afterwards, he gave me a lot of praise for my control of the classroom and my interactions with the students. The only thing he told me I needed to do, was an entry task. I feel as if I will have entry tasks in my classroom, but for the kids who have never done one before, it would be a bit strange to have them start it for just one lesson.
I'm becoming more and more comfortable in front of the students and more confident with my lesson plans. I am starting to think differently about having them read from the book after talking with my supervisor and seeing the high school teachers last week. I had been thinking I would assign book reading as homework, still keeping it part of the curriculum but not taking up as much class time for it. My supervisor said it was important for the students to work on their reading skills and to hear their own voice, and the high school teacher had them read silently for the opening 10 minutes of class. The high school teacher knew that if he assigned it, they would not read it on their own time.
No real problems were faced this week in class. Unless you count your supervisor not being able to come up with anything to work on!
Anyways, that's my week thus far.
No comments:
Post a Comment