Over the course of this internship I expect to have many professional and important dilemmas and decisions to make about my students and my own teaching philosophies. There are many things that I anticipate I will need to manage in the near future for the benefit of myself and my students.
a. Developing a Professional Identity
I strongly believe that a teacher's professional identity in the classroom impacts how his or her students learn in the classroom. My MT (Mentor Teacher) has developed a strong professional identity, which allows her to be confident in her teaching style, while still being able to critically evaluate herself and adjust to her students' needs. One of the dilemmas of this internship is that (for now) I have adopted a professional identity very similar to my MT. As this year progresses, it will be crucial that I develop my own identity separate from my MT based on the philosophies and practices that I feel are most important.
b. Building strong teacher-student relationships
One of my personal beliefs that I have always kept at the core of my professional identity is that there needs to be a foundation of strong teacher-student relationships in the classroom in order for meaningful student learning to occur. Creating a classroom community where my students feel cared for, safe, and respected is on some levels much more important to me than curriculum will ever be. My MT and I strongly agree on this point. I am currently interning at a school where many of the students and their families have a low socioeconomic status. Lots of students are struggling academically and are not getting proper support at home. Many of the students lack profound and healthy relationships with the adults in their lives and have therefore developed mistrust for authority figures. It is going to be a real challenge to get through to some kids. My MT and I have taken a lot of time at the beginning of the year to try and combat this way of thinking by creating classroom meeting times, and presenting ourselves as loving and available to help and talk with students. Still, I anticipate that classroom relationships will continue to be a dilemma throughout the internship year.
Areas of Confidence
Starting off the internship year, I feel very confident in my ability to plan a high quality lesson. I have always made it a priority to plan specific strategies that will incorporate and accommodate students of all different academic levels. This year, about a quarter of the population at my school speaks Spanish as their primary language at home. Thorough planning and lesson plan adaptions and extensions will be very useful this year in order to create lessons that are appropriate for all of my students.
Areas I Need Help With
Classroom management has always been something that I struggle with. One of my main problems was that I did not educate myself on all of the different management styles and tactics that are currently being used successfully. My MT has really helped model some effective classroom management strategies. My job now, will be to work on implementing these strategies the best I can. I anticipate that I will probably fail often, but eventually I will find strategies that I am comfortable with that will work for my students.
Available Opportunities for Learning
I am so excited to have a smart board in the classroom this year. I have already watched my MT use the smart board for almost every core subject. I have never has the opportunity to work with or create lessons designed around a smart board and I believe that this resource will open up all sorts of teaching possibilities.
Literacy Practices
My teacher specializes in literacy and has dedicated much of her time and her classroom to reading and writing. I am excited to incorporate other core subjects such as science and social studies into our literacy program, because I have noticed that these two subjects are not getting the time that they deserve in schools. I am also looking forward to creating lessons about the writing process because I have noticed that my students are not very familiar with it.
Hope:
ReplyDeleteIt's awesome that you know the areas you want to improve upon this year. Classroom management is probably one of the hardest areas for new teachers to master. We look young, we seem like we don't know anything, and many students might not take us seriously. I struggle with this as well. I am having a hard time balancing being a loving and open teacher and a disciplinarian. I know I'm not in school to be a babysitter or a parent, but sometimes I feel like both of these. I care about my students, but I don't know if they know that, and I don't know how to convey this without seeming like a pushover. Like you, Hope, I will have to form my own professional identity and find comfortable ways to be loving and caring while keeping an orderly classroom.
-Mandy
Dear Hope,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your response to the prompt.
I agree that it seems like you are very similar to your MT because it’s difficult to have your own identity, or at least show that you have your own professional identity because you are really a guest in his or her classroom. I think it is neat how all teachers are different because teachers are people, and naturally, all people are different. Every teacher has his or her own style, and I think that this is one of the most intriguing aspects of the teaching field.
I fully agree with you on this point as well. There is nothing more important than developing a relationship with each and every student that you teach, on one level or another. Teachers need to make it a point to fully get to know and understand their students so that they are able to tailor their teaching to meet the specific needs of all students present.
You seem to be very confident with teaching many English Language Learners in your classroom. I have some experience with this, but it is limited. I would like to gain some more experience to feel confident in being able to differentiate my teaching to fit the needs of all of my students. I also find it very important and necessary to plan thoroughly. I know this is not realistic to do for every lesson of the day, but I actually like to write a script of exactly what I am going to say before I teach the lesson. I will not necessarily go exactly by my script while I teach, but it gives me a basis for what I would like to say and what information I would like to convey to the students.
I think that everyone, even the most experienced of teachers, have difficulties with fully maintaining control of the classroom. From what I have heard from veteran teachers and what I have experienced thus far, classroom management is always a challenge. Like you mentioned, it is always good to have multiple strategies in your arsenal to pull out as needed.
An area that I may need help with is being able to mesh my own ideas of what I would like to teach within subject areas with the rigidly written curriculum given to us at our first Professional Development meeting. The district has scripted out exactly when it wants teachers to teach lessons and how they should be teaching them. Just like Kersten and Pardo mention in their article regarding finessing and hybridizing, “Expecting teachers to follow policies in a standardized fashion, with varying quantities and types of support for learning about the expectations, is unrealistic” (Kersten & Pardo, 2007, p. 146). I need to find a way to be able to hybridize my idea of what I want to teach with what the district, state, and nation want us to teach. As our article mentions, it is important to find the strengths of different sources of teaching to best benefit our students.
Literacy is my main interest and passion in teaching, and I think it is so very important for children to have a firm grasp on reading and writing. In my opinion, literacy is probably the most important of subjects because it feeds into all of the other subjects so naturally. For instance, if children do not have specific strategies to comprehend text that they read during Language Arts time, there is no way that they will be able to comprehend a text in science or social studies. If children do not have metacognitive skills to support their specific strategy use while reading, they will have difficulties reading the expository texts that are found in science and social studies.
Thanks for writing. I will see you in class!
-David