Standard 3: Instructional Planning

The practitioner plans instruction based upon knowledge of subject matter, students, the community, curriculum goals, and state curriculum models. 

Today we continued reading strategies in 5th hour. All of the students put up a debate about completing the work. Alot of students argued with me and said that I lied to them because on Friday I said it was the only day we would be doing reading strategies. What I meant to communicate was that we were only reading strategies during the class period Friday. I didn’t mean that we wouldn’t keep reading them on another day, I just meant that we wouldn’t be doing two different activities during class on Friday. After explaining myself I apologized to my students for the miscommunication and then gave them a list of the agenda. I told them that we need to complete reading strategies 4-6 and the review, then we can take a break from the readings strategies and begin a new unit. After explaining that schedule most students settled down but some kept up the fight. I feel as if they were on a sugar high from the past halloween weekend. I don’t know if they ate some candy before they came to school, but normally they are tired in the morning and very compliant, not as hyper. 

After yesterday’s experience with reading strategies, I found some clips on youtube that pertained to the passage. Today we were reading 3 passages. One was about the trojan war so I asked the class who knew about the trojan war. Only two kids raised their hand, TJ and Logan. I asked them both to explain what they knew and they had conflicting views, so I picked apart their views and told the class which were true. Then I explained the two armies involved in the war and how the war started. Then I showed a clip from the movie Troy. The clip started with the Greek gift of the trojan horse and how the Trojans accept the gift and bring it into their city. The class got to see the walls that the Trojan army had built and how the Greeks came out of the trojan horse at night. This clip was helpful because the students were interested in watching. They were intrigued from Logan and TJ’s discussion and wanted to know more. After the clip we read the passage and answered the 3 questions following. There were only 3 questions, but the clip was only 2 minutes and saved me from an argument with the students. Instead of arguing we were discussing the Trojan war and most of the students were interested. The next passage we read was about the Olympian runner, Wilma Rudolph. I had never heard of her before so I googled her and found a clip of her winning the olympic gold medal in the 100m and 200m race. I decided we could watch the clip after reading the passage since the passage addressed her training during high school. After reading the passage and answering the questions we watched the clip and the class got very excited to see her win her races. This gave me some insight that the students really liked watching sports. We had about two minutes before class ended so I decided to show the class the x-games clip I found that pertained to the passage we read yesterday. The passage talked about sky-surfing so I was able to find the gold medalist jump of sky surfing and the students found it pretty cool. 

Standard 10: Computer Technology & Standard 4: Instructional Strategies

Standard 10: The practitioner evaluates technology and integrates it into instruction in a way that fosters learning, using technological resources both as teaching and learning tools in the classroom.

Standard 4: The practitioner understands and uses a variety of instructional strategies to encourage students' development of critical thinking problem solving, and performance skills.

In science, the students took a practice quiz to classify 25 different materials as conductors or insulators. Afterwards, we played a game using the Promethean board. The students got to come up to the board, one at a time, and match the images with their respective energy. The students had fun with this game. 3rd hour was very energetic, it was hard to control the energy. We would have the students volunteer to answer a question. The student would come up to the board and use the pen to drag the image to the specific type of energy it displayed. If the student got the correct answer a specific ring tone would make noise. The students found the sounds amusing which encouraged more students to volunteer. Some students wanted to do it a second time but once you answered a question you couldn't return to the board. After answering a question the student would return to their seat and pick another volunteer. Some students didn't want to volunteer and that made the student's who wanted a second chance upset because they would have chosen differently. Kyler pulled me aside and asked why we weren't letting the motivated students go up to the board. "Why wouldn't you want us to go up to the board? We really want to go and these other students look as if they are being forced to go up." Kyler is an active participant in class when he chooses. He found this review game fun and chose to be actively involved. If he isn't interested he doesn't apply himself to the lesson, instead he will zone out and copy notes from his partner. With this review activity everyone could be involved, we didn't have the chance to loose any students from being involved, unless we gave all of the questions to the students raising their hands high in the air. This situation represents a catch-22, "Let only the excited students answer all the questions and loose the attention of the other students, but make the volunteers happy. Or involve everyone and aggravate the excited students by denying them the chance to answer another question." Either way someone is unhappy, but I would rather have everyone involved. Therefore my response to Kyler was, "I would rather have everyone involved. You are a pretty outgoing student where some may be intimidated. They could use some support going up to that board in front of the class. Maybe you could cheer them on? Show them some support?" Kyler said, "okay, I just really enjoyed going up there, it was fun to answer those question." I replied, "I know, give them a chance and let them see how much fun it is." After my conversation with Kyler, I started thinking about the reading strategies I do with my 1st hour class. As a class we read passages and answer questions to prepare the students for the district/state assessment. Each student reads a paragraph in the order they are seated. The students are not allowed to pass unless they have a 504 or IEP that specifically addresses reading out loud. We haven't had any problems but in this situation, students who would enjoy reading out loud are limited to a certain number of paragraph during class where the other students who do not enjoy reading out loud are forced to, most of these students complain throughout the class. In this situation it may be better to give the students class participation points for reading out loud, to prevent complaining/poor attitudes. The students would be motivated by the point system to read out-loud which would hopefully decrease their poor attitude in class.