"Teacher Bladder"

This week I started picking up classes and by Friday I had 3 out of 4 classes picked up. I am starting to feel that "teacher tired," but more importantly I have discovered what it means to have a "teacher bladder." According to Urban Dictionary, teacher bladder is "the ability to prevent oneself from requiring the need to urinate less often than every 12 hours." If you haven't yet experienced this, I would start to prepare because the time will come.

I would rate my experience this week as a 4. Everything went smoothly and according to plan, or rather the "new plan" because of the snow days last week. I started picking up classes, which went great. I am just exhausted and ready for the weekend! Plus, I really need to empty this teacher bladder. I was surprised this week at how "not nervous" I was about picking up classes. Last semester I would have driven to school terrified while having an intense conversation with Jesus. However, this week I was calm and ready for the experience. I believe this shows growth! One of the biggest lessons I learned this week was to always over plan. It's better to over plan than to under plan and have students sitting with nothing to do. With this in mind, I made sure to pack my lessons full for next week. On Monday, I am starting my first week as the teacher in the classroom. In anticipation of this, I planned my lessons early this week to give my CE plenty of time to look over my lessons and allow me to make appropriate changes. Before leaving school at the end of the day on Friday, I made sure everything I needed for next week was prepared and set aside. With this done and my lesson plans in place, I feel confident that I am ready to officially start my 10 weeks of student teaching.

For standard 1 (NCPTS) this week, I had the opportunity to sit in on a parent-teacher conference for a student who was failing almost all of his classes. This student is smart and capable, he just doesn't seem to want to do his work. A meeting was called with all of his teachers, the principal, his mother, and himself to discuss the upcoming semester and how/what changes can be made. I did not actively participate in this meeting, I just observed, but I feel it provided me with a great opportunity to see how a teacher leads in a meeting like this.

For standard 2, I really focused on getting to know the students and who they are as individual people. With this only being my third week with them and with all of the snow/ice days, I really have not had much of an opportunity to get to know them as people and as learners. Next week, I plan to take time to have the students fill out an interest survey to further help me in achieving this goal.

For standard 3, I took an in-depth look at the standards I will be teaching next week. I spent some time unpacking these standards and looking back at the 6th grade standards to see what they should already know. Once I felt confident that I knew what the standards were saying, I started to look for resources (some on my own and some from my CE's stash) that I felt would be good for the lessons.

For standard 4, I took those resources and started to plan my lessons. I look at the different classes I had and the diversity in each and planned the best way to present the content next week. One of my classes, I know will pick up the content really quick, so I had to plan extra activities and assignments for them. Another class, will move really slow. They are my lowest class. They will need a slower pace and plenty of practice time. The other two classes should move at about a normal pace.

For standard 5,  I took the notes that my CE made on my teaching this week and reflected on them. I was very pleased with myself to discover more positives than negatives in those notes. However, I did take those negatives and spent some time reflecting on how I can turn them into positives next week.

I hope everyone has a restful weekend and a great week next week!

"sNOw school"

Wow, another crazy week. I have been in the classroom for 10 days, but I have only seen the students on 5 of those days. This week started out with a holiday so school was closed. On Tuesday, we were blessed with a full day of instruction before being slammed with snow on Wednesday, which closed school for the rest of the week. School was out for staff and students on Wednesday and Thursday, and Friday was an optional teacher workday with a 3 hour delay. However, my CE decided she was not going in and advised me not to make my 40 minute commute because the roads surrounding the school were still pretty bad. We texted back and forth for a little while and decided on a plan for Monday. I was suppose to pick up a class on Monday. This is still the plan, but I will pick up the last class of the day and observe her modified plans during the other periods, which I will then "copy" for the last period.

Overall, I would rate this week a 3. Nothing extraordinary bad happened, it was just a little frustrating to only have school 1 day. With it being the end of the semester, and students facing benchmarks January 29- February 2, we are desperately trying to get all of the content in. It's a scary feeling knowing that the students may not get an adequate amount of time to practice new concepts before the benchmarks. This is where I have learned and experienced first hand how important it is for teachers to take advantage of every possible minute of instructional time. Next week, we will really have to buckle down, keep the students focused, and get the content with as much practice as possible in.

This week, for standard 1 (NCPTS), I had the opportunity to sit in on the School Improvement Team meeting. My CE participates in this committee, so I will have more opportunities like this in the future. While I only observed, it was beneficial to see how these meetings go and I picked up on some things that I could do to help improve the school. A lot of these were just little things, like standing in the hallway during class change, but its all the little things that come together to help make the school great. For standard 2, I was able to sit down with my CE this week and discuss, and document my own notes, on the students and their different needs and abilities: the highs and the lows, who had 504s, BIPs, IEPs, who faced issues at home, who was defiant, who was a good helper, etc. I used my seating chart to make little notes and reminders until I am able to commit all the students to memory. For standard 3, I printed copies of the 7th grade math standards, and their unpacking documents, and began looking at the ones I will be teaching during my time in the classroom. For standard 4, I planned my first set of lesson plans, which I will implement next week as I begin to pick up classes. Majority of these lessons will probably not go as I had planned due to the snow this week. However, adapting my lessons plans to meet the needs of the students is just another part of facilitating learning. For standard 5, I spent a lot of time paying attention to how instruction and learning takes place in this classroom. I made notes and thought about how I can best continue this instruction in the near future.

For my portfolio, I have almost completed my classroom website, I just have a few more things to tweak. I have been using the portfolio tracker to make sure I am staying caught up and that I am prepared for Saturday's seminar.

I hope everyone has a great week! See you all tomorrow for a wonderfully long day of edTPA.

1st Week in the Classroom

Wow! What a week! This was my first week in the classroom and it was a doozy. The week started out on Monday with the students being sent home at 11:15 due to a chance of ice. The teachers, however, stayed, which gave me a chance to talk with my CE quite a bit and plan out how we wanted the semester to go. Tuesday began with a 3 hour delay for both students and staff which resulted in another day of very limited instruction time. On Wednesday we had a normal day, but it was "Wonderful Wednesday" at my school which basically just means it was club day. Every Wednesday there is an alternate schedule and the last hour of the day is set aside for students to do clubs. Each teacher leads a certain club for 6 weeks and the students usually get their top choice of which club to attend. There are all kinds of clubs but some include scavenger hunt club, Disney club, sports clubs, coloring club, nail painting club,...the list goes on and on. My CE leads the scavenger hunt club and I will pick up this responsibility in a few weeks when I take over. Moving on to Thursday, we had a normal instruction day with a normal schedule. This was my first chance to observe how a "normal day" went at my school. On Friday, my grade level had their ELA NC Check In. This is just a state mandated benchmark for English - Language Arts. So, we had another crazy schedule. Out of the whole week we had one normal day. It was certainly a wonky week, and I was constantly on my toes,  but it was interesting and enlightening to see how my CE continuously had to change her plans and take advantage of her spotty instruction time. Despite the craziness, I would rate my week a 5 out of 5. I am absolutely in love my school, my CE, the students, the administration, and other staff members. I can't wait to start taking over in the classroom and becoming more involved.

Since this was my first week in this classroom, I spent majority of the time observing and "getting my bearings." I focused on how my CE implemented her instruction and tried to start making plans and mental notes for how I wanted to continue that instruction when I take over. I reflected (NCPTS 5) a lot this week on how the school and my specific classroom ran, and tried to "set my mind" to a teacher mindset. Later in the week I started focusing more on getting to know the students and communicating with them while trying to establish myself as a leader for them (NCPTS 1). I've began making notes about some of the different needs of my students and started planning for how to differentiate my instruction for them. My 2nd period has several different needs to be addressed. While none of them fall into the range of needing a resource math, some of them do qualify for a resource ELA and those issues trickle into the math classroom as well. I do not have any inclusion classes but there is definitely a lot of differentiation to be addressed. I focused a lot on these students during my observations so I can best be prepared to facilitate learning for them (NCPTS 4).

Next week, I will continue to observe what is happening in the classroom, but I have plans to take more steps to interact with the students and start to establish myself as a teacher in the classroom.

For my portfolio, I have started putting together my classroom website and plan to have that finished and posted this week. I also have created and set up a Live Binder to start putting materials in for my portfolio. I have a "portfolio checklist" saved right on my screen so I am continuously reminded of what I need to be working on. Getting behind is not an option for me this semester.

I hope everyone has a great week!

Welcome Back!

Welcome back to my education journey! It's been awhile since my last blog and A LOT has changed. I am getting ready to (finally) begin my student teaching experience and I could't be more excited!

I am posting this blog a week late, and it will be shorter as I was not actually in the classroom yet. However, I was busy busy getting ready to walk into the classroom on Monday, January 8.

I found out just before Christmas where my placement would be, so I waited for Central Office to open back up and spent the first week in January getting a background check, drug test, TB test,... all that fun stuff. Once all of that was done, I was finally able to contact my clinical educator (CE) and make plans to meet with her.

With all that going on, I also spent the week reading, hi-lighting, making notes, and rereading the student teaching handbook, syllabus, and the 7th grade math standards. I was anxious to get into the classroom and to be as prepared as I could be. I also started trying to plan out how I was going to keep myself organized this semester and made lots of folders in my computer.

It was a stressful week knowing that I wasn't starting on the first day of school. However, I am thankful for the extra week that I had to rest and recover from a surgery I had over Christmas break. Thats about all I have to say for now. My next blog will be much more inclusive and detailed as I will actually be in the classroom. I can't wait!

Rubrics

Hello everyone! This week has brought yet another milestone for us as we registered for student teaching and applied to graduate! It's so close, I really can't believe how fast this semester is flying.

This week, I want to talk a little bit about rubrics. As college students, rubrics are especially important to us. They tell us exactly what the professor expects of our work, and if we follow the rubric then we have a good idea of what kind of grade we will make. On the flip side, rubrics are also important to us as future educators. It allows us to communicate our expectations to our students, eliminating the excuse "well, I didn't know what to do" or "I didn't know you wanted us to do that."

This week, I overheard another teacher complaining because she assigned a project to her students a week ago and many of them did not create a project that was up to her expectations. She told her students that while they did in-fact complete the project, she expected more from them. My immediate thought was, did she give them some kind of rubric? I later found out that she did not.  As teachers, we absolutely have certain expectations and standards that we want our students to live up to. However, if we don't communicate that to our students in a clear manner, then its nearly impossible for them to succeed.

I know many of you are planning to teach at the elementary level and may think that's a little to early to introduce rubrics to your students. I've included a link to a resource that may change your mind on this and give you some ideas for using rubrics in elementary school. I also really like the idea of using rubrics for classroom management. Here is a link for a rubric that describes a teacher's expectations for attitude and effort. Finally, here is one more link that can help you get started with creating rubrics. While rubrics are usually displayed in a table format, don't be afraid to get creative with your rubrics and make them more "pleasing to the eye," especially for elementary or middle school students. The most important thing to remember when creating rubrics is that they clearly communicate the expectations of the teacher.

My personal opinion is that it's never to early to introduce rubrics to your students. At the elementary level, they don't have to be elaborate or excessively detailed. They can be simple "checkbrics," or checklists. Students know if they check off everything on the list, they (probably) made a 100. As the students move up in grade level, the rubrics can get more detailed and formal. This not only helps them succeed in class and on projects/assignments, but also prepares them for high school and college later on.  Clearly, rubrics are a great tool to assist teachers with facilitating learning (NCTCS 4).

Thats all I have for this week. I hope everyone has a great week next week and a happy Halloween!

End of October, Say What!?

Hey guys!
It's been a few weeks since we've blogged and a lot has happened! About two weeks ago I was able to teach two lessons in my clinical. I was super nervous, but I think it went well. To help with my refection of the lessons, after my second lesson I had the students answer a few questions:
1. Did you learn anything form Miss. Ramsey? If so, what?
2. What did you like about Miss. Ramsey's teaching?
3. What did you not like?
4. How do you feel about Miss. Ramsey teaching you next semester?
5. Leave any other comments for Miss. Ramsey.

I stressed to the students to be honest on these questions and not worry about hurting my feelings. I wanted them to take these questions seriously so I could get a good understanding of how they learn best. I also wanted to know how they genuinely felt about the dynamics of the classroom changing after Christmas break, so that I can do what I can to help make the transition easier for everyone involved. I gained a lot of useful information through this short reflection activity. Some of the students admitted that they were nervous about having a student teacher, and they were worried they would not do as well. This was a major wake up call for me. I have been focused on my own achievement next semester, but I hadn't stopped to consider the achievement of my students as well. This really changed my way of thinking about next semester. It's important that my student teaching semester is successful and beneficial to my professional growth, but the connection has now been made that the academic success of my students is included in my success. One cannot happen without the other.

This short reflection was super helpful and provided me with some great information about my students. If you have the opportunity, I would suggest doing this with your students, especially if they are older and can take the reflection seriously. And, of course, this all relates to NCTCS 5: Teachers reflect on their practice.

Also, within the past few weeks, I have begun to move out of the "observation stage" and started working with the students more, particularly during their independent practice time. This past week the students took their quarter one benchmarks. It was interesting to see how this whole process took place. The beginning of the week started with my teacher preparing the students and reviewing the material that would be on the test. She spent class time reviewing and also stayed after school for two days to provide tutoring. On Wednesday they took their test, and some finished up on Thursday. Friday was filled with mixed emotions as I watched some students celebrate their scores as others were disappointed. This, I found out, was one of the highs and lows of being a teacher. You celebrate with the students who did well, while your mind races trying to figure out how to help the other students in the weeks to come.

I am going to relate this to one of the NC Professional Teaching Standards that we don't talk about as much: Standard 6, Teachers Contribute to the Academic Success of Students. A teacher's rating on this standard is measured by a student growth value calculated by the statewide growth model for educator effectiveness. The EOC/EOG assessments, Career and Technical Education Post-Assessments, and Measures of Student Learning provide the student data that is used to calculate the growth value. The student growth value places a teacher into one of the following categories:

• Does not meet expected growth
• Meets expected growth
• Exceeds expected growth

After the benchmarks, my teacher immediately started planning for how she can better reach those students who did not meet the expected growth during the first quarter. As far as how to approach the students, she reflected long and hard. In the end, she decided to not place to much emphasis on the grade. She assured the students that this grade would not impact them the rest of the school year, but she also stressed that some of them needed buckle down and work hard and let her know how she could help them. 

That about catches me up on the hi lights of the past few weeks. Moving forward into the next week, I have obtained a copy of my schools improvement plan and have started to research other information needed to complete LE 5&6 in EDUC 435. I can't believe that we are headed into the last week of October, but it feels good to be marking off those tasks. I hope everyone has a great week! 

Time is Flying

Wow, I can't believe that September is almost over. I have no doubt that October will go just as fast and before we know it, we'll be on Thanksgiving break thinking "only 2 more weeks!" When Dr. Parker told us how fast this semester would go, I honestly didn't believe him. I thought it would be the longest semester so far. But, I am ready to get stuff done and start student teaching! At the begining of the semester I was panicking, but the closer we get to student teaching, the more prepared I feel. I am really starting to fall into place at my clinical experience. I am a quiet and reserved person, so it has been hard for me to take those steps and talk to the faculty and the students and make myself known. I am much more comfortable observing from afar. This past week, I had more opportunities to interact with the students and assist them during independent or group work. I also had a chance to interact with some of them outside of class, like in the hallways or at lunch. Interacting with the other teachers and staff is still a struggle for me. I usually sit back and listen, but I have set a goal for myself to start conversing and adding my input. This should help me with NCTCS 1 and working collaboratively with my colleagues.

This upcoming week, I am teaching the Math 1 class on Monday and Wednesday. I have been working with my CE to plan my lessons and get everything in order. Currently, the class is studying slope and linear equations. My lesson on Monday is a review lesson from their introduction to slope last week. I have planned a game of SLOPE, or BINGO to help them review and practice these concepts a little more before moving on this week. On Wednesday, we will look at creating linear equations from word problems. I am looking forward to this lesson, because it provides me with a great chance to work on that literacy strategy component of edTPA. My CE gave me several ideas for this one, but I am still finalizing my plan. I am trying to come up with the best way possible to facilitate the learning of this concept for my students (NCTCS 4). At the end of my lesson on Wednesday, I want to know what my students liked and didn't like about my teaching to help prepare me for student teaching. So, I have created a quick survey for them complete for me. This will also help me reflect on my practice later (NCTCS 5).

I am really looking forward to getting my feet wet this week and getting a taste of what is to come in only a few short months. Good luck to anyone else teaching this week!