Last One!

April 15, 2015   What is the most important thing you have learned during fieldwork observation? Why?

The most important thing I have learned over the last few months of doing observations has probably been how important it is to connect with your students. I have loved observing in my second grade classroom. I can see how my teacher has really connected with her students. She loves them so much. I love seeing how much they trust her and how they feel completely safe with her. It has been fun to be able to be in the classroom the last half of the semester. I think it would have been more of a learning experience as to how to start a relationship with the kids, if I would have been in the classroom at the beginning of the school year. Because I would have seen how to begin the relationship and how to bond with the kids. 

I also think that having order is way important as well. I think that having order in the classroom helps you as the teacher to feel more focused on your kids and not on cleaning  and organizing your classroom. My mom is a teacher and she always tells me how much easier it is to be focused. But not just having your classroom clean, but having your kids know what you want and how you want things to go in the classroom. Making sure they know that you are the teacher and that you are there is very important. 

I really loved this assignment. Observing in the classroom has been a lot of fun. I have had a chance to gain some friendships with the students I get to work with and I am going to miss them when the school year is over. But this just made me way more excited to be a teacher and have a classroom of my own!  

Number 7

April 10, 2015 What are the procedures the teacher uses to make everything run smoothly in the class?

My teacher that I work with has some great ways that she manages her class. One of my favorite things that she does is, "hands up!" When she says this, the kids stop whatever they are doing and put their hands on their head and look at the teacher. I like this idea because you can then see who isn't listening and it is just an easier way for the students to pay attention. With their hands on their heads, they can't do much of anything else. 

Another thing that my teacher does is one of the things we discussed in this module. She is very good at the motivation and consequences. She has this system of tickets. She will randomly hand them out for good behavior. Or she will have the "motherload" of ten or fifteen tickets at once. It is a good way of getting the kids to be on task. And it is actually really cool at how many stay on task. It is amazing how students will act when there are rewards in  the aspect. It is a good thing to keep in mind for when I am a teacher. 

Number 6!!!

April 3rd, 2015:   What strategies does the teacher use to actively engage the students? How effective are these? 

The teachers have a ton of different roles that they have to accomplish during the day and sometimes it can be stressful. There are many different types of strategies that they have to try to get all of the students engaged and feeling like they are being included in everything. And that is hard. There are many different kinds of personalities in the classroom with so many different students, and it is difficult to try to get everyone in on something. In my classroom which I have been volunteering in over the past couple of months, I have noticed a few different ways that the teacher does things to keep all of her kids engaged. 

One of my favorite methods is here, party rocker. It is this speaker/disco ball that is connected wirelessly to the iPad. You go into the app and turn on the music and the disco ball. She does this when the kids are working really hard for longer periods of time. She will let them work, and after a few minutes she will turn it on for about 30 seconds and let them dance all crazy. After she turns it off they have to get immediately back to work or she won't use it the rest of the day. I love it because it keeps them all active and they love it. 

Another thing she does is pair share. All the students get into pairs and share something that they have learned during the lesson. I like that because it gets all the students talking and they are talking about what they learned. There are many other strategies that teachers can do, and I am excited to see what works best for me when I am a teacher!