The authors provide a list of eight tips to let you know your lessons are appropriately paced. Look at the list and reflect on your teaching for the past few days. How many of these tips do you think apply to your classroom? Describe which ones could be observed and give examples.
After reading the eight tips to ensure lessons are appropriately paced, I believe all of them can apply to my classroom. As far as my enthusiasm in the classroom, I have a true passion for my content area. 99% of the time, I am displaying sincere enthusiasm for what I am teaching. My seniors, on the other hand, are harder to please. Most of the seniors are holding out any enthusiasm for the day in May when they walk out of their school forever! However, I have noticed that the more enthusiasm I show during the lesson, the more at least interested and awake the students are!
I believe I do a good job of ensuring student understanding. I initiate a lot of discussion in my classroom with higher-level thinking questions. The more I can get the students to relate what we are learning in class to their current lives, the more most, if not all, of my students will understand and remember my lessons.
A few areas I can definitely improve on are moving quickly from one activity to the next and transitioning in an orderly way. I think creating smaller activities would help in my classroom, especially with the ever-bored, tired seniors. This would keep them up and moving. I also need to establish a procedure for transitioning between activities, especially group activities. My students are easily distracted with talking to their peers, so these transitions need to be highly structured.
Kristina,
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad you are enthusiastic about your content and are able to share that with your students! I've seen/had teachers that know so much about their subject area and it's amazing, but they are unable to relate it to students. Taking your enthusiasm and sharing it will make your students life long learners. Hopefully they will gain some excitement about what they're learning and you will be an excellent role model for them. One of my favorite quotes in education is "Students don't care what you know until they know that you care." Making content relevant to them and making it exciting will ultimately make students more interested in what you have to say. Good luck engaging your group of ready-to-graduate Seniors! I think planning quick activities will be a big help!
KRISTINA,
ReplyDeleteI think your last paragraph was very insightful with regards to analyzing your own teaching. I myself also need to work on making my activities smaller, along with including either smaller or less objectives/per lesson. I think a good resource for you with regards to transition ideas might be other teachers in the building or teachers you yourself had that were really great.