What were the positive and negative aspects of my middle school experience and how did they shape me as a future teacher? Reflect on evaluations.
I was lucky enough to have my internship in no ordinary classroom. Miss Noltie implemented a lot of the new strategies and activities that we have spent so many classes in here talking about. First, she would always start the day with a writing warm up that had a theme for each day of the week (Video Thursday, Creative Tuesday, etc…). After all of the kids had written about the warm up for the day, she would ask if anyone wanted to share and it was always an open, welcoming environment where all of the kids could bounce ideas off of each other and share anything they wanted to. We also didn’t get a chance to do as many activities since they were reading a book, but when we did one it was almost always interactive. For example, she was trying to teach them about different story elements and so she had them in groups and they walked around the room to different posters and added ideas of how these concepts were represented in the book they were reading. Or at the end, instead of making the kids write an essay for the final project with the book like all of the other teachers, she had them do a Socratic seminar so they could discuss all kinds of elements of the book and learn more about it in my opinion. I think her idea of emphasizing group work and hating worksheets is a philosophy that I want to implement in my classroom. I also just like how she treated them. She treated them like the young adults they want to be rather than an elementary style, which is what most of the teachers in the school did. I think overall I was just really lucky to have a young teacher who was ambitious and wanted to try new styles of teaching and worked really hard to build strong relationships with her students. She is a teacher that I definitely aspire to be in many ways.
One thing that wasn’t the best during my internship is that part of the curriculum was to read this really long book called House of the Scorpion, and there was not nearly enough time to read this. We spent a lot of class periods with Miss Noltie just reading the book out loud and many of the kids struggling to stay awake. I think this really took away the effectiveness of the book and made it more of a chore rather than a leisurely read. I also feel that they had a bit of trouble getting into the book because they weren’t reading it themselves and so a lot of them would goof off as she read the book but she would not know since she needed to be reading. I would say the only other negative thing was that they were really talkative and it was sometimes hard to get them quieted down when we were trying to do activities.
I think this experience has given me some really great ideas on what to do when teaching agriculture, as well as how I should treat my students that I have in class. I feel that I know a lot of group strategies that would help me, as well as new technology that I could use to teach lessons. I can see myself conducting Socratic seminars on agriculture issues or using an app to help students build visuals of how a farm or agribusiness would work. I think this experience has left me with some awesome ideas and has helped me develop my skills when talking to the kids. I was able to see firsthand how these students want to be treated and what is most effective when you are trying to talk to them. I just feel that after this placement I am really excited for a future in teaching and seeing all of the new things I can come up with to help build an agriculture program and relationships with the students I have.
For my evaluation, I felt pretty good about Miss Noltie’s words about me overall. The only thing she said I may need to work a bit on is getting in there a bit more with the kids and taking a bit more initiative. I definitely agree that I didn’t take as much as initiative as I could, especially at the beginning, because I was unsure whether it would be a disturbance or not. I guess now that I have seen the evaluation, I have a better idea of how much is too little when it comes to helping in the classroom and I want to make sure that at my next internships sites and just my teaching career in general, that I am doing my best to be active and involved with my students. I am glad I got that feedback and hopefully I can work on that.
Teacher Evaluation Artifact
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lt6j42fJ8g-7CUHEcvy8JDilC9-aLuep/view?usp=sharing
Teaching Portfolio 