Mrs. Tiana Grap

Children are born with the capacity to care about other people. As they grow older, biases taught to them by their sphere of influence become a part of who they are and how they act. According to “What If All The Children Are White?” in Chapter 8, it is essential to nurture “children’s capacity to think of themselves as coequal members of the human family and to feel connection with people who are racially, culturally, and economically different from them” (p. 125). Children need to be taught how to care for other people, as it is an essential human function that can be practiced with repetition and purpose. Children can be taught how to stand up for people who do not look like them, to appreciate cultures that are different from their own, and to step into becoming an activist. Click the link below to read an article from the Washington Post about powerful child activists.  

https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2020/04/11/12-kids-who-are-changing-their-communities-our-world/?arc404=true

Describing My Best Teaching

The lesson that I chose to reflect on was one that I wrote and implemented during my second semester of student teaching. This lesson is targeted at Kindergarten, and I chose it because not only was it an extremely successful lesson that was effective with my students at the time, but I also wanted to reflect upon the pieces of this lesson in order to implement them into my current teaching placement of Transitional Kindergarten. 

My Transitional Kindergarten class is actually a long-term substitute position at Citrus Elementary School in Chico. I interviewed and received the job with the understanding that the duration would be half of the school year-from the start of school in late August until winter break in December. My students are mostly 4 years old, and there is approximately a 50:50 student ratio of students who have had prior placements in Preschool before this class and students who have had zero experience within a classroom setting. The professional setting that I was in at the time of the creation and implementation of this lesson plan was in the second semester of my teaching program in a Kindergarten class at Little Chico Creek in Chico. This was a full class of 24 students who were all 5 years old. These students were also in the second semester of their school year, and they therefore understood the rules and routines of the classroom setting. 

The lesson I selected is a whole-class lesson for the Morning Program of a Kindergarten class. The morning program, or opening lesson, is when all of the students are on the carpet, and it includes calendar work and vocabulary practice. Having an opening routine that is generally consistent is important for a Kindergarten classroom setting because it sets the tone for learning for the day. Not only does it introduce important Language Arts and Math skills through counting the days in school and working on the monthly calendar, but it reinforces a classroom dynamic of students working together towards a common goal. Students can be engaged with the teacher, with the content, and with one another as the choral read and sing. The lesson that I chose to reflect on integrates at least ten Common Core standards and at least six ELD standards. I love the richness of this morning program lesson, as it entails having students practice the routines of the class through rich calendar work, understanding of the days of the week and months of the year, skip counting and patterns, money analysis, flag salute, weather analysis and discussion of the seasons, and robust vocabulary cards for whole-class and partner discussion. I like this particular lesson because the students were receptive to the various integrations of movement throughout the lesson, and it engaged both low-level, ELL, and students with IEPs as well as high-level learners. Student success is integrated throughout this lesson by allowing students to respond in the way that best fits their learning preference, and Depth of Knowledge questions are asked at levels 1 and 2.
Students loved this lesson when I taught it, and I find that students are often at their most successful point in the beginning of the day. I find that students come to the carpet ready to learn and eager to please. They challenge themselves and they learn how to socially interact with their peers through partner discussions. Students like it because the transitions are quick, there is a use of manipulatives and visuals, and the routine feels comfortable. The main challenge that presents itself through this lesson and lessons like it are losing student interest, distracting and challenging behaviors on the carpet during transitions and partner-talk, and keeping student attention spans and the “wigglies” away for an extended period of time. 

The goals of this lesson was to increase student engagement in a whole-class setting and to transition smoothly from one topic to the next with the focus of integrating as much content as possible.  The personal teaching focus of this lesson was also to focus on student engagement throughout the entirety of the lesson through the use of DOK questions, manipulatives, call-and-response teaching techniques, and engaging songs. Student learning is assessed throughout this lesson through various methods that include formative assessments such as checking for understanding by asking comprehension call-and-response and “thumbs up, thumbs down” questions, listening to partner discussions, checking for active engagement in singing the content songs, and orally reciting the number of the day in school.

Teaching and Learning Style Reflection

As I reflect upon my elementary education experience, I remember with fondness the multitude of teachers who individually prepared me for the world ahead and encouraged me to reach my potential and dream big.  I believe that teachers are a positive, influential figure in a child’s life who encourage and act as a mentor by providing a strong and safe social and educational foundation.  A child’s education is fundamental to the person they become through habits they develop and lessons they learn in the classroom.

My typical teaching style is an equal balance of direct instruction and the inquiry model. I use direct instruction in the classroom through stated objectives, the presentation of new material, and through guided practice. A great deal of what I teach in Transitional Kindergarten is done through direct instruction, as students need to be explicitly taught content because they have a very small base of knowledge to draw from. Most of my lessons, both whole group and small group, use teacher modeling to begin the lesson, student discussions, and then practice with explicit, timely feedback to encourage and monitor student growth.  They mirror the classic “I-do, you-do, we-do” instructional model. I value think-pair-share, and involve social skills by giving students the words to express to one another academically.  I also highly value formative assessments, and consistently check for understanding through the use of “thumbs up, thumbs down” responses, daily small group work that provides opportunities for quick checks, and listening to student responses out loud. I use flexible grouping within the class to ensure student success.

I employ the inquiry model of instruction when it fits with the content I want to deliver to the students. It often fits the best with science lessons, although I would like to continue to challenge myself to use the inquiry model in more than just science lessons. I use the inquiry model through data collection, hypothesis creation, and then testing the hypothesis. I was able to use the inquiry model of instruction to guide student learning to understand the aspects of fall, specifically focusing on the changes that occur between summer and fall. I highly value collaboration and group talk, and implement both with the inquiry model with the hopes of encouraging healthy discourse. 

Additionally, I value a classroom that encourages dispersed leadership and shared power in order to give students ownership over their learning. I do this through giving students choice in learning activities, thematic units, and classroom jobs. In all lessons I strive to keep the balance between higher-level learning, including Depth of Knowledge Questions through Bloom’s Taxonomy, and basic skills. I employ interdisciplinary instruction, and especially focus on integrating English Language Arts in every lesson.  The types of instructional activities that I like to incorporate in lessons include the use of hands-on manipulatives, guided practice activities that are engaging and developmentally appropriate, and group discussions. 

One of my favorite aspects of teaching is when a student understands an academic concept. I love watching the “light bulb” go off in their head, and seeing them realize that they are capable of understanding and delivering content. The rewards of teaching are small, and include these daily “light bulb” moments. They stretch even further than watching student success in academics, but also watching students be successful and grow socially, emotionally, and developmentally. In my current teaching position of Transitional Kindergarten, there are huge daily rewards in teaching the kids to be able to express themselves and their feelings with words to their peers and to other adults in the classrooms. 

I believe that students learn through observing others, including teacher modeling. Students learn through replicating and repeating behaviors, building upon their background experiences, and through accessing prior knowledge.  I learn best through being given opportunities to research, learn, and explore on my own. I favor lessons that include visual supports, and often would go and re-type notes from classes in college because I needed the time to visually process the information that was given through lecture. My favorite lessons, and most memorable learning experiences, included project-based learning and thematic units in which I was able to explore similar academic content in various forms.  

My typical teaching style is related to my beliefs about teaching and learning. I believe that students have different learning needs, different learning preferences and styles, and that teaching styles need to reflect student development. This means that students in a Transitional Kindergarten class require different versions of teaching models than students in a 5th grade class, where there is often more flexibility available for student learning. I employ direct instruction within the TK class much more often than I would within a 5th grade class. I constantly am changing my lessons to reflect the needs of my students, and make sure that students are learning content through varied methods.  Additionally, my teaching style of direct instruction and the inquiry model is related to my character strengths as I am extremely comfortable delivering instruction directly and monitoring student progress through formative assessment. I am also very comfortable with giving students a topic and guiding their learning to the desired answers. 

Given the opportunity, the number one improvement I would make in my teaching would be to integrate more STEAM opportunities for students in my classroom. I do not have a great deal of experience with STEAM, and am currently working on integrating STEAM “Tinker Boxes” within my TK class, which would allow students to practice STEAM concepts through solving problems through building. 

References

Estes, T. H. (2016). Instruction: A Models Approach (7th Edition ed.) [P2BS-11].

My second observation for my P2 placement took place on Wednesday morning from 8:45-9:45.  This incorporated the majority of the Opening as well as part of the first rotation of stations.  One of my previous growth focuses was transitions and keeping students engaged. I specifically have been focusing on this within the classroom, and was able to practice this during Opening as we transitioned from calendar, to song and dance, to sitting down, and to vocabulary cards at the end. I feel like I have grown tremendously in this area as I have had practice, gained confidence, and gathered tools specific to Kindergarten.  We are currently focusing on skip counting within the curriculum, and Margie and I discussed this before my Opening so I made sure to integrate skip counting as much as possible through song, movement, and repetition. I also discussed with Margie before my Opening about making content more accessible to students and therefore I focused on making the vocabulary words within the vocabulary story cards more visual for students, specifically ELL students.
You and I discussed how all of the activities that I engaged kids with on the carpet integrated multiple content standards as well as had students practicing essential social and behavioral cues.  We also discussed how kids were a little bit more wiggly near the end of carpet time, and it took longer to bring them back to being quiet listeners. I felt that the story didn’t capture the students attention enough and therefore I had to combat that by allowing students to constantly express their reactions to the content through asking for volunteers to share their thoughts, voting on certain pictures, having students react through quiet sign language, and having volunteers come to the board to underline vocabulary.  We also discussed that I can focus on the behaviors of kids during my time in Kindergarten, and start to analyze the connections between the antecedents of student behaviors and how they are connected to the actual behavior itself. We discussed how I can focus on challenging and approaching difficult student behaviors in different ways in order to discover specific ways that students react with well in order to positively modify their behavior.

My first observation for my P2 placement took place on Wednesday morning from 8:30-9:30. It was a wacky day because there was a school-wide rally for “Pink Day” (anti-bullying day), and station time was flipped with opening procedures for the morning. I taught a language arts lesson that overall went very well. I taught levelized groups, and we talked about how to differentiate instruction within the levelized groups by attending to specific student needs. This comes from knowing what the students individually need to work on by having discussions with Margie on academic focuses for each student. We talked about how Kami was at a much lower level than the rest of the students in the top group, and how she needs some specific one-on-one attention to build her confidence in her reading abilities and to teach her core reading strategies such as decoding and context clues. Margie and I had a discussion about specific students in the levelized groups on Friday, and after testing has been completed on students we decided to make a few students and move a few students into a higher levelized group and a few students into a lower levelized group in hopes that they will be more successful. Kami was one of the students that we decided to move to a lower levelized group as we felt that she would be more successful with students at her level because being with students at a higher level was not encouraging her to rise to their level but was rather discouraging her in her abilities and making her fall farther behind.  We also discussed strategies to successfully lead transitions between stations, which included learning songs and refocusing strategies to capture student attention, holding student expectations to a high level, and making sure that students were actually frozen during “Cheetah Freeze”.

During my PI field experience lesson for math class, my group and I taught identification of 3-Dimensional Figures. The lesson consisted of direct instruction on the different shapes (sphere, cube, pyramid, cone), and guided students to correlate the different shapes to real-world objects that were similarly shaped. Students then played a matching game with the 3-Dimensional shape and a picture of that 3-Dimensional shape on a Bingo-oriented game board.
Overall, the lesson went really well. I think that students were able to make strong connections between the shapes that we taught them and real-world objects.  The matching game went really well, and engaged students quickly. It was difficult teaching the students with special needs because we didn’t know what the student needed specifically (Did they need an object to play with? Did they need to sit next to the teacher?), and we didn’t know what the teacher and aides had been working on with the student. It was also difficult to teach any of the students because we didn’t know them and didn’t know what academic level they were at. It was also difficult getting all of our content and lesson plan to fit into the short 10 minutes. I found that we had to cut parts out almost every time because we were running out of time.
I learned that planning a lesson for a station is much different from planning a whole-class lesson. There is a greater opportunity to teach to individual student needs, but there is less time to teach and review content in tangible ways.  I felt like planning this lesson was easy and didn’t take much time, but the eventual product of the lesson that we taught was slightly different than what we had planned (which happens in most lessons). While conducting the lesson, I also learned that student engagement and attention is limited, so there has to be activities that capture student attention.
Based on our matching assessment, I do think that learning occurred. I was surprised by the number of students who already knew the names of some of the 3-Dimensional shapes, and therefore it was a review for them and a challenge to apply the shapes to real-world objects. Other students learned some of the shapes that they didn’t previously know and were able to correctly match them in the activity at the end. Some students who were lower academically needed additional scaffolding and prompting in order for them to make a correct match.
This teaching assignment was valuable because it gave me the experience of teaching math in a short station. I haven’t had any experience with stations in the 5th grade placement that I am currently in. It was challenging to make sure that all of the elements of a successful lesson were present in 10 minutes, and that students learned new concepts and were able to apply their new knowledge in a culminating activity. This lesson helped me to develop knowledge of subject matter because I was forced to research content for kindergarten grade level. It helped me to develop knowledge of student learning because I was able to identify which students needed to be challenged further, which students needed additional support in order to understand the concepts being taught, and which students needed redirection in terms of behavioral difficulties. I learned that content has to be appropriate for the developmental and academic levels of the students being taught, and that students that are grouped together will most often be at different levels.

Today I was able to volunteer in my Special Pal’s Special Day class, which is definitely my preferred place to be if I had a choice between that and her mainstream class.  Today was definitely more hectic than usual though, because there was a sub and two of the regular aids were not able to be there.  Therefore, I was quickly asked to lead a station of my own, shown the rules of the game very quickly, and left to fend for myself.  I was actually quite pleased with how it all turned out-there were four different rotations with about three kids each time, and each group was at a different level.  I spread out a bunch of different flashcards with words on them in the center of a circular table and each student started with their hands behind their back.  Then I called out one of the words that was on a flashcard and the first student to touch the correct card with that word on it got to keep the card.  It was quite fun to play, and although the kids did a little rowdy and loud at times it was fun for me to be able to see kids break out of their shells and enjoy learning, which didn’t happen very often under my observation.  I enjoyed interacting with the kids on a personal level, and was even able to practice some classroom management skills to keep them under control and remind them to use inside voices.