From Green Blazers To Blue Corduroys

Finishing the Final Week Strong Planning for my final week of teaching I am giving back two classes, Animal Science and Food Science.  In theory this makes sense because my contract was to teach till the point I got and then hand them back over.  I will say I am going to miss teaching the students.  The struggle I had this week though was a classroom management issue which I found myself having no guidance on dealing with. I had two students decide to start shouting at each other and even though I told them to knock it off they proceeded to continue shouting at each other.  I found this to be a frustrating situation because this was my final day in that class. I did everything I was trained to do and yet part of me feels like I should have escalated it from a warning to a write up.  I hope to move forward from this instance and focus on the positives of teaching. I am excited and nervous to be wrapping up this week.  My game plan is to have 15 more suc...

Weekly Recap: Being Decisive. Being Meaningful. This week I had my final formal observation.  One of the big points that Dr. Foster made is I need to be more decisive in my directions. thinking back I have found that often I struggle the most with being decisive and giving clearly expected directions.  I think part of my difficulty has just been getting use to being in the "teaching shoes."  For 5 years I have been the student and now this semester I am the teacher.  I need to adjust a bit more on giving clear instructions and expectations while I am teaching. It has been a difficult challenge for me trying to better predict where the challenges lie for students to understand a set of directions.  I also realize now that I often say the words would like you too when I really mean I want you too.  I need to not be afraid of being direct to my students in what is expected for all projects and directions.  I think as a student teacher this has be...

The Journey of Student Teaching: Day 20 Fourth Week Reflections: Teaching a Full Load Essential Question for this Week: What did you learn this week while student teaching? To me this fourth week started out really nerve racking.  Only 3 days into the semester and I will be teaching for a total of 7 out of 9 periods in the day.  To me this was nerve racking more because this made me realize that this was real. With teaching 7 periods what I learned is that I needed to be willing to let the Inquiry and Independent work happen. As the saying goes: When you assume . . . And I probably started last week with that with the students. For example when I hear the word Biotechnology I think that students should have strong scores in chemistry and biology before taking it.  What I didn't plan on was on that in a high school not everything is taught on the level that I learned stuff in high school. And so I started Biotech last week with this feeling of total dread bec...

Weekly Investments: Classroom Management  This weeks prompt is in one of my personal favorites: Classroom Management. And by that I mean one of the things that makes everyone in the cohort worry a tad.   As an Agriscience Teacher we fill three roles at once in our classroom (Instructor, Mentor, Coach) and as a teacher in my opinion that is a little different than compared to other teachers.  Thinking back on my summer reading I remember that classroom management isn't something that works the same way for everyone.  Classroom management is in my opinion something that varies based upon the students in the classroom.   Classroom-Instructor  SAE - Mentor FFA Leadership - Coach Looking at classroom management I think the essential is to establish expectations in which the students buy into.  Looking around my cooperating classroom I noticed right away that Ms Romberger has classroom expectation posters on her one wall.  Here they...