Giving and Receiving...The Stress of conferences

     This week was extremely interesting.  I attended Parent-Teacher conferences for the school that I am currently student teaching.  I have attended conferences as a parent, as an assistant in the classroom, but this was my first time purely observing.  I noticed that it was not only a stressful experience for the parent and student, but also for the teacher.  I noticed that at times there was a struggle to balance the negative with the positive.  I do not think that any teacher wants to deliver all bad news to a parent.  We do not want to tell parents that their child is struggling academically as well as socially in the classroom.  Somehow, teachers do this without making parents feel like all hope is lost.  They balance the positive with the negative, they highlight all of the wonderful attributes of a student, while still instilling in a parent the needs of the student.
      It was equally as stressful, if not more so, for the parent.  You can see the built up stress in parents' faces as they walk into the conference, praying that their child is ahead of the class. They pray that all that they have worked on at home, has translated well into the classroom.  For most parents, this seems to be the case, but for some you can see the devastation in their eyes we you deliver the message that their child is struggling.
     As a teacher, I hope to impart in my parents that we are a team.  They are not walking into a conference of judgement or disappointment.  Rather, we are always working together to make their child is the best student and thinker that they can be.

Teacher Toolbox

     Lately I have been thinking about how my time as a student teacher is coming to an end, and how I have been filling my Teacher Toolkit with tidbits that I have learned along the way.  I think more than anything, I have learned the importance in giving students instructions and directions in a way that will help them understand objectives.  The instructions that I give my students have been the ‘make’ or the ‘break’ of every lesson that I have taught.  Each time I teach something that I feel that the students have not quite grasped, I think back on the instructions that I have given my students and how they could have been more clear or said in different ways to help my students.  I think that learning how to give clear and concise directions to students will be something that will help any grade level that I teach.  Whether they are kindergartners or eighth graders students need to be able to understand what their objectives are, this also decreases the amount of misbehavior that comes with students who are confused by what their task is.  

This week in Kindergarten

    This has been a great week in Kindergarten!  After being sick for a few days the week before, I really missed being in the classroom with my students.  Since taking over the classroom, I have been planning and preparing for my lessons on a nightly basis.  Teaching goes far beyond the classroom.  What happens outside of the classroom is as important as what happens within.  Making yourself well versed in the academic language for your teaching and being prepared for the downtime and transitioning in my classroom makes our days run smoothly and helps me to ensure that my students are learning.
     In two weeks, I will experience my first parent-teacher conference as a student teacher.  I have been making notes about the students, and preparing portfolios to help my cooperating teacher speak with the parents about.  As a parent and as a instructional assistant parent-teacher conferences can be daunting.  As a parent, you pray that your children are not only doing well academically, but are also doing well socially and behaviorally.  As an assistant, I was always the 'back-up' of the opinions that the teacher has about the students.  As a teacher, you want parents to know their child's successes, challenges and next steps.  The students in my classroom are great, and I hope that each parent comes away with that.

First Classroom Field Trip

     This week we took our very first classroom trip.  We visited Bengston's pumpkin patch and together the cooperating teacher and myself wrangled twenty students.  The students had built up so much anxiety and excitement surrounding the visit.  We had one student that cried daily for two weeks because he was so afraid to go on a field trip without a parent, while another student cried daily because her parent would not allow her to go.  I think that field trips are a great way for students not only to build social skills but also to be able to assert some interdependence outside of the classroom.  As teachers, we many times strive to plan each minute of each day.  This, in fact, is a sign of a great teacher.  Field trips give students the chance to show their personalities, to apply what they have learned in the classroom to real life situations.  I noticed how students asked thoughtful questions about animals, they made connections to some of the processes of apple picking and preparing.  I was so proud of my students, and excited to see them in action on future field trips.

PERA

This week I attended a professional development on ways to use formative assessment.  PERA, which stands for performance evaluation reform act, is the new evaluation system that Illinois uses to evaluate teacher and principal performance.  On Thursday, the teachers came together to discuss what assessments would be used to gauge student growth.  As they gauged which assessment tools would most effectively determine student success, they also determined which tool would best determine the effectiveness of their teaching practices.  We talked about how subjective student success can be. They worried that their teaching would be unfairly judged.  Assessing student growth is imperative, but as I watched this group of excellent teachers second guess whether their teaching would be 'enough' to satisfy the evaluation, I realized that teaching is a lifelong commitment to self reflection.  There will be times that our best, may not be good enough.  There will be days where the failures may outgrow the successes.  I believe in my future students, and I will be committed to reflect on my teaching consistently and in a way that will help my students learn.

Kindergarten Pumpkin

     This week I chose and decorated the theme for our classroom pumpkin. My class has been reading the book, Fly Guy for a few weeks, so I decided that we should make a Fly Guy themed pumpkin.  The students absolutely loved planning for, decorating, and talking about the classroom pumpkin.  I think that it is really important to include activities that help build community in the classroom.  I really saw how this activity helped students talk to each other about their likes and dislikes, and engage in discourse about the things that are going on in our classroom.
     Last Thursday, I began teaching for almost the whole day.  I think the hardest part has been gauging the student learning.  I have been really utilizing formative assessments constantly to make sure that my students are learning content.  It is also amazing how quickly the day goes by when you are teaching for the entire day.  It is extremely difficult to fit in all of the activities that we've planned, but we try to get to everything  before the week ends.  

Teaching my way into a new season

It is amazing to see that we have already made it to October!  The amount of time that I spend teaching has increased, as well as my responsibilities in the classroom.  The transition has been great, but at times I can tell that it is hard for students  to adjust to the change.  I think that because of this, it forces me to find a style of teaching that feels most comfortable for me and not mimic the style of my cooperating teacher.  When I teach lessons that include elements that I have created, it always seems to be more successful than those that I am teaching solely from the lesson plan.  

     It has been challenging to work on my EDTpa, lesson plans, and keeping up with all of the responsibilities of being a teacher.  As I go through each task for EDTpa, I have tried to not only be reflective on the mini-unit that I filmed, but also on my teaching as a whole. I thought about how the strategies and philosophies of teaching can be implemented in an effective way in the way that I teach every day.  I think that it will be most important to remember that these strategies are not just vague concepts that we have learned about in books, but best teaching practices that we use to help our students learn.