Standard 4 & 5: Organizes Space, Time, and Interaction
One of the largest factors in creating a successful learning environment that I have learned during my internship is establishing strong classroom management strategies. Students must understand how they are expected to behave and act if lessons are to be utilized for learning. More specifically, students must understand what it means to be a productive student. Also, students of today are constantly engaged with the new technological developments. Therefore, I have learned the advantages of incorporating technology into my lessons. When teaching concepts that I found students having a harder time engaging with, I found that students were able to interact with the material of the class in a more engaging manner through the use of technologies in the classroom.
In the beginning of my lead teach and new semester, I created a PowerPoint presentation that outlined my classroom rules and procedures. Since students just came back from break, I aimed to refresh their memories of how our classroom was to run. The presentation was to ensure that students were completely aware of my expectations of them in our classroom. In the presentation, students learned what a positive learning environment requires to exist. Students also learned what types of consequences will occur if they elicit behavior that is not conducive to learning. The ultimate goal is for students to be reminded of how to behave inside a classroom and not as they do outside of the classroom.
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Click button to download PowerPoint presentation
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In aiming to promote positive classroom behavior, I used the board to display the students who were not acting accordingly to the classroom rules. I would first give a student a warning by writing his or her name on the board. If it were a student’s second offense, I would circle the student’s name signifying a phone call home. Finally, if a student made third offense, I would remove the student from class by sending him or her to the student center where the student met with the assistant principle. By writing down student’s names and symbols, I was able to keep track of students who were disrupting class while teaching my lesson. Furthermore, after school, I was able to keep track of whose parent/guardian that I need to call.
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While I taught in my classroom, I strived to incorporate the technology available to me. I found that technology was a great way to make teaching grammar more interactive. I created a lesson plan that used the Promethean board—similar to a Smart Board—to teach coordinating conjunctions and semi-colons. Students were able to come up to the board and use the Promethean board’s pen to move words and punctuation marks around to form the particular compound sentences. In other words, students became more engaged with learning by getting out of their seats and interacting with the material in different way than paper and pen.
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