I printed out each of my lesson plans and placed them in a folder the day before teaching my first lesson. I remember looking at my first lesson plan for about twenty minutes during the prep period directly before the period I was to teach, nervously rereading the words I had written over and over again. The first ten minutes of class I looked at the lesson plan probably fifteen times, terrified that if I didn’t stick to exactly what I had planned to say, I was somehow going to fail these students terribly. I was so nervous; I could feel my heart beating in my fingers and toes. Surely this was going to be the longest fifty minutes of my life.

I finally reached the fun part of that first lesson, the activity where we were able to watch a movie about persuasion. It gave me a few minutes to breathe and recompose myself, and the students began laughing at all the funny parts. I smiled and laughed with them. The rest of the lesson passed by in a blur; as the last student walked out, I celebrated the end of my first lesson. One lesson down, ten left to go!

Over the course of the practicum, I learned an immense amount about teaching and learning. Most importantly, I had the opportunity to learn what does and does not work for me as a teacher, relating specifically to classroom management, noise levels, student interactions, and classroom activities. As the lessons continued, I was able to fall into my own comfortable pattern, learning what type of person I wanted to present in front of the class.

Walking in to my practicum teaching unit, I had very little experience specifically working with middle school aged children. I was unsure what to expect from children this age as far as cognitive level, or quality of work produced. Over the course of my unit I was exposed to a range of student abilities, and had the opportunity to work closely with my supervising teacher to determine what could and could not be reasonably expected of students. Furthermore, I learned how to break down complicated concepts to their most basic form. At the middle school level, students are still building the foundation of the education they will need for the rest of academia. Instead of analyzing the way literary devices shape a piece of literature, like they do in high school or college, middle school students are working on simply identifying literary devices within a piece of writing, stating how they are similar or different to another device, and working on creating his/her own.  

As a teacher, I learned that I appreciate a large amount of class interaction. I built in time to each lesson for students to share with other students, to collaborate on group work, or to give feedback about whether or not they were understanding the material. Go to activities included think-pair-share, power share, and work time where students could choose to work alone or in small groups. As long as it appeared that the class was on task, I was not opposed to a significant amount of noise. Noise most often represented that the students were working together to complete the required class tasks. I expected the students to work with a variety of their peers, and made an effort to choose groups where students had the opportunity to work with peers they may or may not have chosen to. While this was difficult for some students at the beginning of the unit, after repeated exposure to these activities it was clear that it became easier and more familiar.  

Of all the things I learned during this work sample experience, there are still some questions I am left with that I hope to address in future teaching experiences. I often had difficulty with students simply not doing the homework, or not turning it in on time. I would like to research and experiment with different ways to motivate students to do and turn in homework on time. Additionally, I had trouble figuring out how much each assignment should be worth. I wanted to make sure that students felt that the projects and assignments were important and worth doing, but did not want to make each assignment worth a large portion of the student’s grade. I have every faith that these two questions are topics that I can address and further investigate during my second work sample experience next semester, and look forward to uncovering the answers.

If I had the opportunity to continue with this same classroom, I know I would want to take a step back and begin focusing on the specific elements of an essay. Instead of assuming that my students understood the basic components of an essay, I would need to break them down into manageable pieces that could be explicitly taught. We would cover different types of introductions, how to write a thesis, and how to transition from one idea to another.

This is one area that I had assumed the students were already familiar with, which led to difficulty once they began working on writing their own persuasive essays. From my conversations with my cooperating teacher and my own preconceived notions, I had falsely assumed that my students would be able to jump into the essay writing once we discussed the pieces of a persuasive essay such as fact, opinion, and counter argument. However, many students struggled to even begin writing an essay, and first drafts of the essay showed no introduction or no conclusion. These ideas are crucial to writing essays, whether they are persuasive, narrative, or informative, and are skills that are vital for higher education. Additionally, I would institute time where the student would have to work on writing every day. Many students balked at the idea of writing even a full paragraph, and getting ideas down on paper is necessary before one can begin arranging and editing them into a quality essay.

After interpreting the results of the pre and post tests, I have also realized that many students were still unable to verbalize the concept of counter argument. This is a very abstract concept, and would need to reappear in future lessons. Finding examples of it in stories, essays, and articles, pointing them out, and having students explain the example to the class is one way this would be possible.  By continuing to address this concept, students will have additional opportunities to apply and conceptualize it into their own understanding.

Students were given periodic feedback throughout the unit. The primary source for feedback was written, responding to questions and reflections in the student’s journal. I made sure to collect the journals at the end of every class period so that I could provide feedback for the next class. I also made sure to give the student written feedback after the final essay was graded, letting students know what was particularly strong about their essay, or how the student could improve on future essays.

Verbal feedback was given to students throughout lessons, especially when students volunteered to share their work or notes with the class as an example. If a student had a particularly strong answer or example to share with the class, I made sure to praise the student’s thoughtfulness and hard work. The continual feedback made the classroom a very inviting place, and by the end of the unit students were vying to have their work shared as the class example.

Unfortunately I did not have the opportunity to speak with any parents or guardians of my specific students. Because I was at the school for such a short period of time, and a family emergency pulled me out of town during parent/teacher conferences, there was no opportunity to meet about student performance or behavior.  However, if I were to continue with this class, there are certain procedures I would put into place.

In order to involve parents/guardians in their student’s progress, I would plan on sending home regular progress reports with personal messages about the student and his/her participation and quality of work produced. If a student was not successful, due to poor behavior or lack of engagement, I would first confer with the student about what reasons he/she had for not performing to expectations. After speaking with the student, I would also make contact with the parent or guardian to share the plan the student and I had made, and additionally recruit the parent to help the child and I put the plan into action. By actively engaging the adult at home, there is a much higher chance the child can be successful.