Articles for Improvement

https://www.edutopia.org/blog/instructional-pacing-tips-rebecca-alber

The purpose behind reading this article was my pacing. My pacing is not the greatest and

many teachers I have talked to say that this comes a little easier with time and practice.

Throughout student teaching, I have found this to be true. My pacing throughout my time student

teaching did improve but I think it still needs a little work. This article presents seven different

ways you can improve the pacing in your classroom. A couple of the suggestions are, clear

directions, smooth transitions, creating a sense of urgency, being prepared, and assessing

throughout the lesson to see where you may need to spend a little more time and where you can

shorten parts of your lesson due to the students understanding the content well. These are all

skills I would like to continue to practice continuing to improve my pacing.

https://www.teachhub.com/22-ways-add-rigor-your-classroom

Another topic that I wanted to learn more about and continue to improve on is how to

provide effective rigor in the classroom and provide an extra challenge for the students. Students

should not only be given the support they need but challenges to continue to promote critical

thinking. One way that has been suggested to me and they also talk about in this article is asking

the deeper questions and have the students do the thinking. Expect thorough answers from the

students is another strategy they suggest. Students can give basic answers to show understanding

which can be okay at time but to up the rigor in the classroom we should be expecting deeper

and more thorough answers from our students. The also suggest that students need to be working

on their own problem solving. They give many other suggestions in this article to help promote

rigor in the classroom. I picked out these three things because they are things, I have identified

that I need to work on for the future. As a new teacher, it is still a little difficult for me to know
when the students should take the lead on something. I need to work on letting the students be

more independent in these areas and help them to develop their critical thinking skills more and

continue to provide a more rigorous environment in the classroom.

https://www.usf.edu/atle/documents/handout-interactive-techniques.pdf

This third article that was read was an article to help improve whole class engagement. During a

few of my lessons, I felt like I was losing my students. This is never a great feeling and

sometimes it can make a lesson feel like it failed even if the students did comprehend what was

being taught. Student engagement is something that we want because we want all of our students

to benefit and learn from the material was are teaching. A couple of the strategies mentioned in

the article that I attempted to use in the classroom was the Total Physical Response (TPR). I

would ask the class to answer by going to one side of the room or the other and then we would

discuss their answer. Another strategy that was mentioned in the article that was similar to one

we (my cooperating teacher and I) used in class was the Think-Pair-Share, we would have the

students turn and talk with a shoulder partner. I would like to get better at incorporating whole

group activities that can be used fluidly throughout a lesson. This article provides hundreds of

different ways.