Looking back, I think one of the biggest lessons I learned in my PSII practicum so far is that while a unit plan looks spectacular on paper, once you learn your students’ needs and abilities, and about all the unanticipated things on the calendar such as field trips and photo days , you start making changes. I’ve made A LOT of changes to my unit plan. I don’t see it as a bad thing. It’s an important reminder why teachers have to understand the need to vary their plans to accommodate individuals and groups of students, as per KSA 6. If you’re not willing to be flexible in this job, you’re going to have a bad time! For example, early on in my practicum, right at the beginning of my lesson, a group of students came in and asked if students would like to sample their spicy chickpeas. If that were to happen today, I’d stop the class, let them sample the spicy chickpeas, go out and get a drink of water, regroup and resume my lesson. Inexperienced me though about taking a break and waiting for the visitors to leave, but I decided to plough through the lesson… because that’s what I had on paper, darn it, and no Great Chickpea Incident of 2015 is going to derail my plans. Silly me. I lost the class and had a hard time getting it back on track. There have been several times that I’ve told my TA that I thought about something and then never followed through because that’s not what was written in my plan. I think with confidence, which comes with teaching practice, that I will trust my gut over my written plans. (KSA 1 contextual variables) One of my big goals for the final two weeks of this practicum is to listen to that little voice in my head. Ignoring it has proven to be detrimental to my teaching.
My other big goal heading back to the classroom is to work on my lesson closures. I admit I had to look back at my textbook for a refresher, and I’ve been ignoring them in my lesson planning. Packing up their books and transitioning to the next lesson or class doesn’t cut it. I’m looking up ways to creatively wrap up things in a way that benefit students and formatively show me what they learned. I’m thinking of doing some short reviews where I pre-choose five students (secretly by putting sticky notes on their desks so other students don’t think they can mentally check out of the lesson) to speak for 30 seconds about something we’ve uncovered that lesson, and get students to summarize the characteristics of the Aztecs and how they compare or contrast to today’s Albertans. Another option is to ask students to write a test question from today’s lesson. More ideas appear here: http://teaching.colostate.edu/tips/tip.cfm?tipid=148 The closures will not only help me assess students’ learning, but keep them accountable for their learning. Once they expect that there is an activity coming at the end, they hopefully will pay attention so that they can successfully complete the activity. (KSAs 9 instructional strategies and 11 assessment)
Nine teaching days remain. I can’t believe how much I’ve learned and how comfortable I feel (most of the time) leading the classroom. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that some days I come home feeling defeated and wondering what the heck I’ve gotten myself into. Then, there are others, such as the Thursday before Good Friday where I read the students’ I Am poems and they absolutely blow me away. The creativity I’ve read on the pages of their quick-writes, where they get five minutes to freewrite from an illustration of “The Mysteries of Harris Burdick” by Chris Van Allsburg, is astounding. They have such talent as writers! I am so excited to get them writing short stories when they return and read what they craft on paper! It’s these days that make the 5:30 a.m. wakeups worthwhile.