One of my biggest goals through teaching is to make my students comfortable within my classroom. I think that in order for the class to be successful the environment must be a positive and encouraging one. This would include positive praise and communication between students and teachers. With this comes routine procedures to develop flow and ease on a day to day basis. This allows for students to hold themselves accountable!
Throughout my student teaching experience I was able to develop a rapport with my students at the beginning which naturally helped the classroom environment when I transitioned to fully teaching. I was able to implement my mentor teachers behavior system and incorporate systems of my own as well. Because we had a smaller class for my student teaching we set up the class room so that the students were in islands with their desks. This allowed for independent work and it also helped them focus on themselves. This system didn't deter me from grouping them during lessons. I would often teach and explain what we would do and then release them to work together in small groups or partners to complete a task or assignment. I think that it is important for students to be able to work individually to develop their own ideas, but ultimately I think it is good to group or partner up so that they learn to work with others well and collaborate. I included a math lesson plan that I created within my student teaching that had the students working in groups of three to brainstorm and develop a word problem and drawing on a poster board. This was a harder task because they had to come up with the problem completely on their own, so grouping them was appropriate and helpful. I have also included a picture of my class.
The developmentally appropriate floor plan write up is a hypothetical classroom that I have designed for a Kindergarten classroom. In my ideal class I would have round tables that would provide for student collaboration and learning. Throughout the day I would create different centers for my students to rotate through for learning. I believe that small groups are a great way for the teacher to activate student learning and having that one on one work is beneficial to every student. This shows differentiation because more than likely there are more than one student within your classroom that needs that small group intervention at least one time within the day. The drawing and write to the right explain my ideal classroom!
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In my methods placement at North Star Elementary I was able to teach figurative language to 6th grade students. This was a content driven but engaging lesson that focused on idioms within a text. This lesson involved students working together to practice and create their own idioms and to also work individually to place certain idioms on what it says versus what it actually means. I believe this artifact is a great representation of Standard 3 because it shows collaborative/individual learning while being actively engaged.
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