Based on our reading from last week of the Holly article
about journaling and how to make it most effective in terms of professional
development, I have decided to try to focus on my learning as a teacher, and
reflect on this process.
I wanted to try to narrow my journals to a certain subject,
but that is hard to do when so much happens during my pre-internship, and
different things effect me enough to write about each day. So, for this journal
I decided to tackle a different challenge to me of journaling, the reflection
part, and hope a common theme appears.
For this week, I want to reflect on my classroom management
skills. Thursday morning, I came into my practicum with one thing on my mind
–spring break. The kids would be on spring break starting Friday, which means
my second spring break started when I left on Thursday, and I will admit I had
somewhat mentally checked out from the beginning of the day. I had taken a
really difficult final on Wednesday and needed a break. My teacher was in much
of the same mind set. She had been upset by something unrelated to us and was
not in the right state of mind to be giving her all to the classroom that day.
Needless to say, we were all a little useless that day.
I pushed through helping to do their morning work, getting
them to resource, helping to arrange for class pictures, stuffing and writing
on eggs for our scavenger hunt, and then reviewing for their math test later in
the day. I was productive even though I did not feel like being, and we all did
what we needed to do for the day. In the end, the students made a bunny bag to
hold their eggs, reviewed and took a unit math test, and did a scavenger hunt
for spring eggs that had sight words on them. On paper, it looked like a
productive day and it would be easy enough for me to say that the day was a
success. However, I knew that I was trying to be more reflective in my
teaching, so when the day was finished and at certain points throughout the day
I thought about how things were actually going, why I was teaching what I was,
and how I was handling things in general. And it wasn’t good. I did not know
why I was teaching what I was. I did not think that over an hour making a bunny
bag was necessary. I understand that not every thing a student does has to have
academic meaning, and sometimes there is a time and place for activities like this,
but we were also having a scavenger hunt that was less academic than it seemed,
and the next day was water day and a fun day for the end of the semester. I was
following my mentor teacher’s plans and did not have a say in the matter, but
reflecting on this situation, I did not see the value of the activity compared
to the amount of time spent on the activity. I felt the same for some of the
other activities we did that day, and I was not proud of the teaching that I
was doing that day. Also, I reflected on my classroom management skills for the
day. I noticed that more than normally, I was reprimanding children, for things
that ordinarily I could ignore. Things such as tapping pencils, fingers in
their noses, etc., that I would be able to ignore on certain days or calmly
address, were suddenly bugging me a lot, and I was getting on the students for
their behavior. My mentor teacher was participating in this behavior, and asked
me to move clips for anyone not paying attention and sitting up during the math
review, and proceeded to call children out by name until we had many students
not on good behavior, which is normally not the case for our class. I think
that our attitudes about the day were severely altering the way we were
managing the classroom that day, and it was not necessarily fair. I did not by
any means do anything wrong or punish students unfairly; I just noticed that I
was not as calm or patient as I normally was. Everyone has their triggers, and
I am starting to understand that a trigger for me is definitely when I am not
at my best, I take it out in my classroom, and I did not like this at all.
I think that this reflective thinking will help me to be
more aware of how I act in the classroom, why I am acting that way, and help me
to improve my behavior. I am doing my inquiry to help my students to be
reflective on their behavior to improve their focus, and I need to do the same
for myself.
No comments:
Post a Comment