Emily Roberts

Student Teaching
January 24, 2020
Journal #3
This week has seemed like the longest week so far in my student teaching experience. On

Monday we did not have school, but we did have inservice. I thought that this inservice was very

beneficial and I learned a lot. One of the most beneficial parts of the day was when I attended a

breakout session on trauma. This was beneficial because the person who was running the session

was another teacher who happens to have a child who has experienced severe trauma, and this

child is in my class. The rest of the week was spent on NWEA testing, which I have come to

strongly dislike because of how long and boring it is for all of the students and the teachers as

well. Some positives from the week was that I taught some pretty successful social studies

lessons that the students seemed to really enjoy. I even had one student tell me that she would

test every day if it meant they could do fun lessons. I told her that whether they were testing or

not they would still be doing these same lessons. This was probably the most significant part of

my week as it makes me realize how the lessons I teach need to be super engaging and hands on

for the students to fully partake in the lesson.

Learning Outcomes

The first learning outcome I found evident this week was Teaching and Learning Styles. I

believe that it was made clear to me this week how important it is to incorporate several learning

styles into each lesson. While most of my students enjoyed the hands-on part of the lesson,

others enjoyed doing book work instead.

The second learning outcome from this week was Developmentally Appropriate

Curriculum and Design. Making lesson plans has been the most tedious part of student teaching

and this week I found myself doing the same thing in each lesson. Therefore, I redid my lessons
to make sure I was keeping them interesting and developmentally appropriate for all of my

students.

Prompt

Overall, I believe that my class is pretty well behaved and they do a good job holding

each other accountable. By this time of the year most of our classroom procedures are well

managed by the students. The most common procedures we use are hand signals, timers, sign out

sheets, and designated jobs. Sometimes student behavior gets a little wild when doing morning

jobs, especially on Mondays when we switch jobs. As for instructional grouping, we use a few

different methods to group students. A lot of the time students are grouped by academic levels,

while some of the time students get grouped by drawing name sticks so that the students are able

to work with new people. Most recently my second grade team has started doing bootcamp

which means that the students go to different classrooms for language arts time to get help with

what they are lacking. This groups the students based on levels in reading and comprehension

skills so that every student in that classroom is getting exactly what they are missing.

Based on what I have seen in the classroom so far based on classroom procedures, I

would make only a few changes. One change I would make is that I would share the daily

calendar, or schedule, with the students so they know what their day is going to look like. I also

think it would be helpful to put this schedule up on the board for a visual of what the day should

look like. I also think it would be cool to add a “bell ringer”. On the board there could be some

type of recall questions for the students to answer when they first come in, in the morning. These

are just a few things I would add that I think would give our class some extra edge.