Student Teaching: Week 5

 What I Did This Week

Monday: attended a new teacher's IM1 class in order to gain new perspectives prior to my recorded edTPA lesson the following day, worked with breakout room groups in said lesson, held office hours, taught part of IM1 in my normal schedule and observed the rest to prepare to teach later classes, finished/made edits to Tuesday's lesson plan, graded for IM2, attended a district wide meeting, met with my advisor to discuss edTPA

Tuesday: taught IM1 twice, taught IM2, graded for IM2, attended an IM2 planning meeting, wrote reflections on IM2, attended an advisory meeting, reflected on a teaching segment in seminar

Wednesday: taught a different teacher's IM1 class to practice for my recorded edTPA lesson on Thursday, learned how to operate the Microsoft Teams platform, reflected on that teaching experience and made edits to my plan for the following day

Thursday: taught IM2, taught IM1 twice, graded and gave feedback for IM1, worked on edTPA questions

Friday: wrote this blog, attended office hours, met with co-planners for IM2 next week, created materials for IM2, wrote lesson plans for IM2, graded for IM2

I also often have planning meetings and work on materials over the weekend. This week I had a couple of meetings on Sunday.

What I Will Do Next Week: A Reflection

Teach IM2 - I feel comfortable with this class and I'm glad this is the focal class for edTPA

Record IM2 for edTPA - The recordings went well! I'm thankful to be able to do them on Zoom and not worry about an in-person camera.

Reflect on lessons for edTPA - this did get delayed a bit since we had students stay after class both days, but I got some decent reflections down. I'll do more when I rewatch the video recordings probably!

Write edTPA lesson plans (officially) - my lesson plans are almost fully complete, with just a few notations still needed in places

Grade and give feedback on IM2 work - I've been keeping up with this just fine, trying to give feedback super soon after things come in

Teach some of IM1 - This feels in-between yellow and green honestly. I feel fine about everything that happened this week, but could probably do more

What I Will Do Next Week

Teach IM2

Teach IM1

Adjust to hybrid teaching

Learn about the school building

Expand on my edTPA reflections and do some more work on the writing

Plan IM2 for the week

Grade/give feedback in IM2

How I’m Feeling & What’s On My Mind

I feel fine this week. Teaching is going pretty well overall, though there is, of course, never enough time in the day to fit everything in. I hope we are able to put together some good materials for the asynchronous days so that students can catch some of the good stuff we missed out on (particularly the songs!).

I'm thinking a lot about the transition to hybrid teaching and what that will look like. I'm still nervous for my health specifically, but I'm also nervous a bit about the teaching part. We have a lot of brainstorming to do for how to attend to both "halves" of our classroom. It seems as though much of it still needs to be "online style," since those students who are online still need access to the materials and the activities. I'm likely to do some research on what has been successful for other teachers.

What I’m Learning About Teaching and Learning

I'm continuing to experience the thinking on your feet/improvisation that is critical in the classroom. This is an idea I was already aware of, but I am experiencing it for the first time and trying to learn from the decisions I make and ensure I am making better decisions the next time. I definitely make a lot of choices every day, which can be tough sometimes since I'm pretty indecisive. I continue to practice radical honesty with the students though, so I often admit that I am changing plans, making an edit, or that I'm not sure what to do. Truly, being indecisive is a blessing because it means I end up working more student choice into the classroom. Any time I can't decide quickly enough, I turn it around on them and let the students have the agency! It's worked pretty well so far.

Watching colleagues teach was SUPER helpful for me this week, and I hope to be able to do that on occasions in the future. I took tons of notes and tried to implement what she made me think about into my later lesson. Similarly, tag-teaming teaching (co-teaching, I suppose is the appropriate term) has been very helpful as I have gotten more comfortable with Mr. C and what to expect from him. We've been switching off a bit more and it helps us each highlight our strengths with the material or specific things we want to hit on with the students that the other might leave out.

Something else I've been thinking about is how difficult it has been to equalize voices. I knew this was not an easy task, but it seems to be even more obvious online. With longer wait times and transition times, it feels like there is even less time for instruction, so the more time spent waiting for new students to answer drags things along that much more. Additionally, I hate shutting students down when they're willing to answer, and Zoom norms make it so that you often have to literally interrupt and stop them so that others may speak. It's definitely tough.