The partnership has helped me learn the role of the teacher in an inclusive classroom because I've learned how much teachers have to do behind the scenes.
Like I said, I never realized how much really went in to teaching. I just thought you showed up and taught a class and you went home and you had the summers off.
But now looking more into it I realize that teachers think ahead. They have to know all the different strengths and weaknesses of
each student individually because they have to be able to help the students on a personal level grow and learn.
What would you like to see in the next piece?
I want to do a lot more of lesson planning even if I don't present the lessons.
Now we do things like when you toss us in you're like will you run this next lesson. But actually taking the time to plan it and knowing what you're going to be doing in days ahead.
There is teaching, there is writing lesson plans, there is building relationships with kids and colleagues.
But there's also things like working with a team of four adults to create an integrated unit and how to get along with adults which sounds silly but its stressors that happen at schools.
So far I have been in a first and second grade split classroom, a third-grade classroom, fourth-grade classroom, and also the sixth grade.
So I've seen four or five different teachers because the sixth grade does team teaching. So I've seen a lot of teachers with different ideas and values
of how they teach and it's helped me learn about how there is so many different ways to get the same point across.
And so it's helped me grow because I'd able to take a piece from each teacher and put it together and mold my old own teaching style.
So it's about being knowledgeable and educated on what is the entire... what encompasses being a teacher other than just the classroom.
There is a lot of behind the scenes work.
I definitely think this third semester has been a turning point. Miss Quist has been awesome in giving us so many opportunities in the classroom.
Giving us free range to do whatever but still she is giving us something and we have to come up with our own.
It's not a full lesson but it's a mini lesson off of what we are supposed to do with the kids.
All right, so Timmy just picked the game. We're going to play who's knocking.
Do you want to go sit in the chair first or do you want to call on someone?
It should be quiet in here because she is going to point to someone.
Do you have a guess?
Miss Donnelly is in charge.
Jack?
I've learned that being a teacher takes a lot of work. It's a lot of outside work. It's a lot of effort.
A lot of analysis on one kid, on another kid and you have all of these different inventories of each student
and you have to put it all together into one classroom and make a lesson that works for all the students.
Going into this I never would have known that. I would have still not known that until my Methods of how much work it really is
to run a classroom between behavioral and academic and just everything altogether. It's a lot of work that people don't think is a lot of work.
Welcome everyone to our child study meeting. This is an opportunity for apprentice teachers to learn
about the children in the school.
Mr. Clark does a really great thing in his class not with just struggling students but with all of the students
that in the morning when they would pass in worksheets from the day before
Teagan and I and any teacher who was around would correct the worksheet and then we'd put the worksheets in order
and usually Mr. Clark during snack time would pull aside the three or four students that seemed to struggle
on that specific worksheet. He'd pull them aside for five minutes or so.
Even if the student did have, he would say, melt, even if the student did melt and they knew what they were doing we would still go over to them and have them either
fix or redo the ones that they melted on.
Even if he knew they weren't struggling on it and it was just an off day. So he knew that they knew how to do it. So just that they got the extra practice and could fix their mistakes.
--It's his RTI system, isn't it? --Yeah.
I actually went back and e-mailed one of my elementary school teachers who use to pull me out of class to help me.
And I e-mailed him and thanked him saying I never realized how much work it was for you just pull me aside to help me with what I needed to be helped with.
And he e-mailed me back and was so grateful you're going to the awesome teacher for realizing that.