After having a month to think about and reflect on my first year of teaching, I know I was not the teacher I wanted to be. I did not ever expect to be the world's best teacher my first year teaching, but I know I could have done better in some aspects. I think I got caught up with trying to have everything done- lessons for all three classes planned, documents created, homework for my online classes done- and the stress of that caused me to lose focus on my students. Plus many times I did not create lessons or units to the high standard that I would have liked, I did not cultivate a classroom learning environment in the way I wanted it to be, and classroom management was a confusing struggle. The good news is that I've learned a ton from my failures. So instead of focusing on the bad I wanted to share a few things I learned. It was during the second half of year one that I started getting the hang of things a little more. I think the fact that I was willing to change and go with the flow helped me tremendously this first year. I changed so many things from the first half of the year to the second, including my classroom organization and classroom management techniques. A couple techniques that I used exclusively during the second half of the year that worked wonders for me were Hands & Eyes and Hands on Head. "Hands and Eyes" is a Whole Brain Teaching strategy that I used when I wanted my students complete attention on what I had to say. How it works I say "Hands and Eyes" and then students fold their hands together, turn their whole body towards me and look at me with their complete attention. Hands on your Head (when you're done) is something I used to help me tell who was done working and ready to move on and who was still working. Using this made it very obvious to me at a quick glance who was ready to move on and who wasn't (plus it keeps their hands occupied). How this one works is that when I say "Hands on Head" the students who are done rest both their hands on the top of their own heads. I waited to do this until I thought a majority of the class was done because I have the students keep their hands on their heads until I released them to move on. There are plenty of other ideas that I came up or found during year one that worked well, but these are the two, that I wish I would have used sooner and more often. I am hoping that during this coming school year I will have more time to post about some of these ideas I find or create so that others can use them in their classrooms as well! Looking forward to year two, in order to remedy some of my failures I have been looking and have found some good resources on classroom management as well as creating better lessons and learning environments for my students. One of these resources is where I got the picture above ( link to the full article is located at the bottom). I knew that classroom management was a struggle this year for me, but I didn't realize that the reason was because I was sabotaging my own classroom management until I read this. Turns out I did a lot of these, especially, number 1. I find it helpful to know A) that I am not the only one who did these things and B) know what exactly I did wrong so that I am able correct it for next year. There were so many things with classroom management that I was not prepared for this year and realistically, there was no way I could have been. There were so many things that my students did or didn't do that bothered me that I had never even thought about before. On the other hand, there were other areas of classroom management that I was prepared for which I think was mostly on the classroom organization front with my extras binder, calendar board, and SC (student center). All in all, year one was a success in my books. I left room for improvement, learned from mistakes, and I didn't give up. Year two here I come!
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AuthorI teach 7-9 Health Education & Computer 7 in rural southwestern Minnesota. I love using technology in my classroom and teaching students about how to live healthy and informed lives.
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