Central Middle School Reflection

Last week was spent with more teaching. Since my team has two English teachers who work together to cover the same material, I was able to teach four classes right after each other. This has helped me to become more comfortable with the class, as I became less rigid after each class.

Entrance/exit slips from four classes.

On Thursday, I reviewed theme and read another chapter of Marely and Me. I asked the class to listen carefully in order to identify themes in the chapter. I then presented the class with an entrance/exit slip on theme. To leave the class, they had to complete the questions: What did you learn about theme? What themes did you find in the chapter? List four and give evidence. As I looked through their responses, the majority of the students across all classes did a fair job. The part where students messed up was in forgetting to site any evidence for their second question. In once class, no one had sited evidence, which makes me wonder if I forgot to mention it in that class. For their entrance slip, the students had to answer: List six themes you are interested in. Why is theme important? All students did much better on these questions. In all, this assessment told me what the students understood or did not understand. For example, one student answered, "Theme teaches you stuff." This obviously tells me that the student didn't understand theme very well. Or maybe he didn't know how to word it better. I wanted to reward the students who followed all directions and completed all questions fully. So, I bought apple scented scratch-n-sniff stickers saying well done, nice work, and wow! Maybe stickers are a little childish for middle school kids, but it's something.

As I was marking up these exit/entrance slips, I found it interesting how the levels of the students are so extreme. I feel like there's such a difference between the brightest student and the not-so-bright student. My co-op noted that some students are just not yet there in their development of critical thinking.

Also on Thursday, as I was walking back to class, I saw the next door student teacher talking in the hallway with a student. The student was crying. As I passed by, I could pick up that the student was upset about something scary or violent happened. The student teacher was trying to console her by telling her a similar story. This was the second time I saw a student cry at school. Both times the crying students were girls. It makes me question what my response would be as a teacher. And if I would be prepared for that first time something like this happens.