#12

Teaching the sixth graders was so fun and taught me a ton. I definitely learned that sixth graders are not as young as I thought they were. They were a sharp group of students who kept us on our toes. I think, overall, things went very well. Despite our issues planning with our group, we came together when it came time to do the actual teaching. We supported each other well and taught our very best. We were able to answer the questions that the sixth graders shot at us, which felt good. They were interested in what we were doing, so they participated very well. Them taking notes didn't really happen, so in the future, I think I would need to have either a format that they can follow to help them, or give them more incentive to take notes. We told them to pay attention so they might be able to "do something cool" at the end of class, but that did not really help them know that they wouldn't get to launch as much without knowing the answers. I learned that when it comes time to launch the trebuchets, we need better defined rules of our game so there would be less yells of "CHEATER!!! SHE'S CHEATING!!!" We started to lose control of the class as they launched. I need to figure out how to let the students have fun but still be able tot have control of the classroom.

#11

As I have started reading the Classroom Instruction that Works book, I've found that there are many methods to do everything. There are pros and cons to all of them and a lot of deciding simply has to do with personal preference and style. Studies show that there are some methods that work better overall in some scenarios, but the significance is not very strong. What I take from this book is that as long as you know what you are doing and you are consistent and have a strong desire to improve the lives of your students, you will be a successful teacher. A lot of the strategies given in this book are contradictory to each other, so I will have to figure out which few I want to implement in my own classroom to be the most effective teacher I can be. I thought the section on Homework and Practice to be particularly interesting. It opened my eyes to why I had to have so much homework in High School. Each teacher was trying to get me to spend the recommended 50-60 minutes a day working on that subject outside of school. With six classes, I spent a lot of time outside school working on school work. If I understood as a student the reasoning behind the homework, I feel like I would have been less resentful of it at the time.

#10

I found, as I was preparing to teach sixth graders, that I am really happy that when I teach, I will be able to get input from others as I want it, but I can still make decisions for how I will run things in my classroom. I liked being able to brainstorm in a group to decide the best way to teach trebuchets to sixth graders, but I'm not sure I enjoyed the whole process. Having so many different teachers who have different styles made it so none of us could guide the lesson towards our personal styles. We were able to find a way to collaborate and make the most of our individual parts so we could briefly work in our strong areas. I feel like in our planning process, we were butting heads the whole time. We all had different ideas about what our main teaching goals should be, and therefore had issues maintaining good focus on those goals. Our lesson plan seemed disjointed and lacking strong focus.

#9

As I watched more classmates teach STLs, I also noticed that some people have a more natural "stage" presence. That presence makes it a lot easier for some teachers to adapt to the different questions or responses students give. Some teachers got flustered and confused when a student gave an answer they did not expect. Others, however, used it to improve their teaching moment. Some teachers it was hard to pay attention to because they natural speak in a monotone or very softly. Others made it fun to listen to them and they said stuff that made you want to keep listening. Some of the analogies used were so random and out there that it made it much more fun to listen to, even if they didn't work 100%. I would be curious to find the trade-off between crazy analogies that don't exactly work vs boring analogies that definitely work. I would think that some people would gain more from the crazy ones and other people would get confused by them. But if nobody is listening to the boring analogies, then nobody will learn even if they are good parallels.

#8

Watching the other students teach their STLs taught me a lot about things I like and don't like in other teachers. That, in turn, shows me things I want to do in my classroom or things I want to make sure don't end up in my classrooms. I liked it when we were in small groups discussing and working on things, but I will want to make sure that there is a clear purpose for our talking. Sometimes, as a student, I did not have motivation to participate because I did not see a reason for why I was learning what I was. This all comes back to stating learning objectives and making sure they are pronounced in the lesson. Some of the lessons seemed really patronizing to me. I'm not sure if that was just the content, or the types of questions asked. I want to make sure that I treat my students like they are their own ages. I don't want to teach a 10th grade class like they are 6th graders. That would not go over well.

#7

I taught STL #3. In doing that, I learned that I get very specific very quickly, which makes keeping a lesson interesting difficult. My topic was already very specific and I kept it simple. I thought that keeping the topic very straightforward would be effective, but I felt like I was beating a dead horse by the time I was only a few minutes in. I feel like I had a good anticipatory set, but it could have tied in a little better. It did illustrate my point, but then my whole lesson was taught in just my set. I needed to find more to expand on. As it was, I only taught for ten minutes. I don't really know how to teach for much longer than that, so I need to learn how to do that before I try to teach an hour-long class. I said "um" a lot, which bothered me. I did make a point to call on specific people when I asked questions, but my questions were not the best. The students were not sure what kind of answer I was looking for. It could have gone a lot better.

#6

Alisha Spjute's classroom was very enlightening. She was a very energetic and involved teacher. You could tell that her students loved her and respected her. She knows how to get her students excited about her different projects.

I loved the assignments she used to teach her students the different Adobe products. She added a personal quality to all the projects, which helped inspire the passion and excitement for the students. She used a project where the students were supposed to make a "geek" version of themselves on Illustrator that showed what they loved to do. The kids got super into it and learned tons about Illustrator in the process. A Photoshop project her advanced class did was an assignment about what kids would do if they were invisible for a day. They were supposed to take pictures of themselves doing something and then Photoshop out all the skin so it was just clothes in the pictures. They had to fill in the background realistically using the clone stamp tool or filtering through a second picture. Her project to teach the basics of Flash was simply to have students have the letters of their name fly in and change colors. It gave them the groundwork to be able to do bigger and harder future projects.