Dylan Ryzner

Student Teaching Journal Entry #9

This was another successful week in my student teaching journey as I continue to experience the
life of a teacher at CCA. This week was my first encounter with using a quiz as a form of
summative assessment to see what students were understanding (or misunderstanding) in the
middle of the unit. One thing I found out while grading the quizzes was that students were
struggling with the difference between a deductible and an out-of-pocket max when making
calculations for insurance problems. Because of this, I modified my instruction a little bit to
review more of those types of problems before the test and try to explain the difference between
the two more clearly. Once I begin to grade the tests, I will be able to see if students better
understood the concept. While I was teaching this week, I tried to ask better questions that would
allow students to explain themselves, rather than just yes or no questions. This has worked well,
and I have noticed that the students participate more when I utilize a poll in the beginning of the
lesson. I have also been meeting with students more regularly in Zoom for individualized
instruction. Most of the time, students would like to work on an Excel project, so these meetings
involve helping students through the steps of creating different spreadsheets. This is not an easy
task to be done virtually, but the easiest way I have found is to have students share their screen
and I can talk them through it, and even use Zoom annotations on their screen for further
explanation. I am also working through contacting all my students, both in the content course
and homeroom. I am continuing to pose questions for the students to answer when I am
contacting them to try and elicit a response, which has been somewhat successful. Planning is
also going well, as I am still planning well ahead of when the lesson take place. However, I need
to be cautious not to go too far ahead with the end of my student teaching placement quickly
approaching.
Even though there are still four weeks left of student teaching, there is only two weeks left of my
seminar course at Drexel, which makes the end feel near. I have begun reflecting on the
experience from the beginning to prepare myself for the exit interview and final projects for the
course. I feel like I have come a long way since the beginning of this experience, and I would
like to continue that progress to keep improving throughout my teaching career.
I have also began scheduling times during my last week to observe different teachers at CCA,
and they are all very welcoming and excited to have me watch them teach. I am equally excited
to see how other teachers utilize the virtual platform, and even observe some different subjects.