Well I apologize for skipping out on this on Friday...I was so excited to relax and enjoy my weekend that I completely forgot about journaling at all! Here's what I missed...
Friday (day four) was my last day of being at school for half of the day. I taught my first small reading group lesson that day after "hover" observing my CT and assisting the students during rotations in the morning. You would think that after a semester of teaching small group reading lessons every day and working with my supervisor on small group management that I would have it perfected/down to a science by now. This was not the case! Before beginning the lessons I set up very clear expectations (well, I thought they were clear) and even added my own little management trick to keep the group's focus. I quickly learned that you can have 5 perfect little angels and all it takes is one student to distract the focus of the entire group. 6 students is an odd number because it felt too big for a "small group" lesson but obviously much too small to be considered large group - but at the end of the lesson I had met the objectives I set for myself and the students understood the relatively new concept of drawing conclusions from a text and mapping it on an inference chart. This was successful.
I didn't get much of a chance to conference with my CT afterwards, but she said that she noticed my setting up of expectations at the beginning (which was good) and that next time the groups should be smaller. Even she agreed that six students in a small group was too large to run as smoothly as a group with, say, four students - which is thankfully the number of kids I'll be working with in tomorrow's lesson.
As far as today went, it was a really great day of working closely with my CT and the students and, I think, a nice introduction to what the next eight weeks will be flowing like. We had the chance to sit down and map out exactly what responsibilities I'll be taking over, so that was awesome for me to have laid out on paper. It really is less scary/intimidating when you know exactly what you'll be doing and when. (Except I'm developing a unit for social studies to be implemented next week - ah!)
I think the main thing I'm taking from my cooperating teacher at this point is to not be so nervous all of the time. Obviously, she's been teaching kindergarten for 15 years and she has some experience under her belt. Well, not some - a ton. But I have been trying this new thing where I just own up to the fact that my lesson might work and that it might not, and that even if it doesn't I'm here to learn and I am doing my best to make every lesson work. I've learned that confidence goes a long way. It's like magic. My first whole group lesson in practicum completely tanked because I was so incredibly nervous, and tomorrow I'm doing something very similar - but along the way have learned that being cool, calm and collected is an amazing feeling and seriously makes all the difference (at least it does for me). My main areas to work on from my CT and supervisor last semester were on presence and confidence and I feel that I'm finally getting enough teaching experience under my belt that I can start to make those changes.
And let me tell you, that's exciting.
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