On Tuesday I was in charge of introducing, leading and mainly facilitating the classroom activity "Showdown." I took my time trying to remember everything that our CT usually says. Remember to be a good teammate. Remember that we should treat this as the test since it is coming up on Thursday. You should ask your group members before you should ever ask an adult. And lastly, don't copy your neighbor because that doesn't help you nor them. It was a great day for "Showdown." The kids were really grasping the fundamentals of inequalities. However, they still had trouble with some minor details, but easily workable.
The rest of the class period was spent mingling around groups and answering questions. t felt so great to get in front of the class and takes charge. It was by no means perfect, but it did what I did what I needed to do.
The next day was much more rough. Instead of being in charge of the activity I was in charge of going over homework. This homework (since it was the last one assigned before the test) was a broad review of the chapter. It seems as though the students were not grasping the material from the review as much as they were from the activity from the previous day. Well, only time would tell. We decided to try "Showdown" again with different questions for the day. They did great again. So what was the difference? Simple. Word problems. These kids were not connecting the word problems to what they had learned so far. So their take home review was a sheet of inequality word problems.
After the second day of review all of us adults (including our CT) were much more confident in the students and their readiness for the chapter test. Either way, just like my teaching, ready or not it was "Go Time" on Thursday. We will see how they did once we correct the tests!
Until next time!
NICE! I felt very similar the first couple times that I led our "warm-up" in class. We spend so much time learning about what to do and how to do it in all of our methods classes and educational psychology courses but then when we get in front of an actual classroom filled with actual students who are dependent on us to lead them in learning it is definitely "Go Time". What kind of things did you do well in your first time 'teaching'? What kind of things did you find that you need to work on? Throughout my first couple warm-ups I noticed little things come up in my teaching that I hadn't anticipated. Things like: make sure you make eye contact so you are engaging the students, or be sure to ask "why or how questions" to allow students to further explain their solution (I think this helps other students learn by their peers responses).
ReplyDeleteHi Tyler-
ReplyDeleteI liked that you tried to remember everything your CT usually says. The other day when my students were being sort of rowdy, I said "ladies and gentlemen" and then thought 'Wow I have never said that ever. I guess I'm really becoming a teacher.' Anyway, I noticed that your students were really sound on the basic fundamental of inequalities but struggled with the word problems. I wonder if you guys incorporated word problems as students learned fundamental skills or if you taught all the fundamental skills and then tried to apply them? I think it would be really beneficial for students to continuously make connections to the real world and communicate what they are learning fundamentally in a way that is relevant to their own lives. It might even be helpful to take a word problem that you plan to give students before the big test and break it down throughout your unit. Say the first part of the word problem says that a farmer has 7 fewer sheep than his neighbor, but he has more sheep than he has cats (random, sorry.) You could just take this first sentence and use it in talking about greater than/ less than. Then maybe when they encounter the entire problem further down the road, they might recognize various parts and be better prepared to organize and use the information.