Friday, September 21, 2018
Use of Class Time
The teacher's use of time during this lesson help facilitate learning through engagement. I saw this not only in the Kahoot! activity, but also in the Become the Expert activity. These strategies to engage students with learning the math material seems to be very helpful and facilitated the main objectives of the lesson well. Through this observation, I have learned that I want to have well thought out lessons, with activities that might not take up the whole class time, but enough to help students learn. I also realized how little of lecturing the teacher does during their lesson, which is something I hope to also strive for because the exploration side of learning is interesting to see work well and keeps students more engaged.
Tuesday, September 18, 2018
Physical Classroom Environment

In the classroom I’m in for my practicum, the students work at desks in which are arranged into groups of four. Each group has two desks side-by-side facing another two desks side-by-side. The practicum I’m in has a unique situation in which they do not have a classroom, rather teaches two classes during the day in different classrooms. Their office and desk is in a separate location and for class they have a cart which has all the materials they may need for their students or to help class run. The walls in the classroom we are in are not by the coordinating teacher’s decision, but include a number line, math vocabulary, posters in which the school requires in the classroom, and things about the teacher whose classroom we are in. Finally the technology in the classroom is there is an Apple Smart TV, and the teacher brings to class an iPad and a Mac computer to use with the Apple TV.
When talking to my cooperating teacher about their classroom, we had to keep in mind their unique situation and how they’ve adapted to this classroom environment. In thinking about the organization of the classroom, the teacher had to work with what they were given; which is teams of 4 at desks. How the teacher had organized their classroom in the past was similar, but instead organized the students into rows with partners, but would have students form groups of four when needed. Having this different set up this year has made the teacher think more about management with their classroom and putting more thought into how the classroom would run. The teacher explained to me that the public schools require certain posters on the wall such as positive behavior posters and rights & responsibilities of students. With deciding the rest of the posters and things they put on the wall usually, the cooperating teacher likes putting positive posters and more specifically positive math posters. Some examples of these ideas could be a bulletin board to display points for students or employee of the month or birthday calendar. Another important thing they include in the classroom is a schedule board for the week which includes objectives, homework, and the agenda. Technology in the classroom, such as smart board and chrome books are utilized to be engaging with students. The teacher did mention the preference to mix up the use of technology and interaction without technology being both important. One thing the teacher has missed in their classroom this year is the smart board and really misses the ability to annotate easily and have students write up their work easier.
Based
on my observation and conversation with my cooperating teacher, I started to
gain some understanding on what I would want the layout of my classroom to look
like. As my cooperating teacher explained in his classroom set up in the past,
I would choose to have rows of students paired up with the ability for students
to turn their desks to form groups of four for group work/projects. This will
help me achieve my goal of having a lot of group and partner work to learn and
master math topics. Another aspect of the classroom I would want to incorporate
is a smart board projector onto the white board. This allows for interactive
learning and is easy to demonstrate procedures to mathematical topics.
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