First Public School Placement

During the first semester of my sophomore year, URI required all education students complete a practicum placement. This placement served the purpose of getting our "feet wet" in the teaching career and allowing us a chance to be sure the career was for us. I was placed at Frank D. Spaziano Elementary in Providence, RI in a seance grade classroom. Below is an excerpt from the Journal I kept throughout the semester.  I felt this piece is important because in order to move forward we must all reflect back on what brought us here.

Summary of Thoughts

After concluding three weeks in the classroom I felt I was becoming more confident in myself and leading the children in activities. I remember back to my first day in the classroom, I had tried to get the students attention but was unsure how to do so, I now have a variety of ways to get there attention that I feel comfortable using in the classroom. These ways include shutting the lights and turning them back on or clapping my hands in a rhythm and the students clapping back to me. I was happy with the progress I was making and how much the students respect me. While in the classroom these past two weeks I have learned how to act as an authority to them instead of simply a friend. My CT has reassured me of my progress working with the children and has slowly started to give me more difficult tasks to do in the classroom. Being able to work with a teacher who is slowly giving me more responsibilities is rewarding because of the experiences I am having with the children.

I was happy with the progress I was making and how much the students respect me.

Analysis of Significant Events

• On October 21 my CT discussed a “Flying Cars” article with the students. She began the lesson by passing out hand-outs on the topic and asked the students to look at the picture on top of the hand-out. The main purpose of the lesson was to get students aware of where paragraphs begin and end and the purpose for the paragraphs. She read the handout herself first and had students follow along using their fingers. Then asked different students who she knew would be confident to read to the class read each paragraph. After reading it a second time she asked questions on the reading. Each question she asked is taken directly from the text and can be answered using an exact sentence from the handout, she planned this in order to reinforce the idea of answering in complete sentences. Finally before finishing the lesson she asked the students to pull out a crayon and together they will mark off the beginning and end of paragraphs. She asked students to raise their hands if they knew the answer and also asked why the paragraph was ending. She concluded the lesson by talking about separating paragraphs allows you to separate .

• On October 28th the students are still working on their final drafts of their summer papers. One student in particular still did not understand the assignment. He had never asked a teacher for help so it was just assumed he understood. He finally reached out to me so we went over the details together. I reminded him to next time communicate his misunderstanding, this will help him avoid confusion and allow us to get him on track on time.

• On October 28th another teacher came in to give a lesson on the desert. She took the lesson from the student’s science book and taught the students how to use a graphic organizer. This is her second time coming into the classroom, and during her first time she introduced the graphic organizer to the students. This gives the students a good opportunity to learn how to organize their thoughts. For this lesson she dove deeper into the lesson and created knew graphic organizers off of topics they had talked about in the previous organizers. The original organizer said “desert” in the center and what was found in the desert was branched off. This time she took what could be found in the desert and made separate organizers. Some of them included “the jack rabbit”, “the cactus”, and “animals”. the students developed a good understanding on how to organize information and were very engaged and excited to complete the lesson.

October 2015

Now, as a college graduate reflecting. I appreciate the time I took to write down each of these lessons. At the time, I appreciated even the small moments I had to teach a child or discuss a strategy with any number of students. Helping the child who was unaware of the directions was a major step at that point in my career. I was able to address the expectations of the writing assignment, while also revising the importance of communication. This attempt at incorporating the child's social need into the conversation helped show me the importance of addressing the behavior that brought the child to the misunderstanding instead of simply discussing the directions. Understanding children's communication needs and meeting children where they are at is an important aspect of teaching. I now know to include a modification in my class to get him the directions in a non-verbal way, one that would eventually lead to encouraging him to use his words and eventually speak out when appropriate during lessons.

#msoconnorsthoughts