Now that the semester is coming to and end, I am reflecting on my achievements of my three learning goals and the semester as a whole. I found that I was most successful in reaching my first learning goal of taking daily observation notes. Every day at my PDS I took detailed notes, including my ideas, my wonderings, my questions and my concerns. I found this learning goal to be very beneficial as it helped me complete my assignment for a teacher researcher notebook in EDUC 600 and a teacher notebook in EDUC 414, as I was able to compile and organize all of my observation notes, data, artifacts, pictures, and resources into a notebook. I found this notebook to be very useful in developing my inquiry of context and in completing my wiki assignment. Through reading all of my notes and looking at the artifacts and pictures of student work, I noticed I had a reoccuring theme over the concern that the writing station was not differentiated while the reading station was. Since this theme reoccured and became a strong wondering, I decided to use this topic for my inquiry of context. When developing my presentation for my inquiry, I realized having all of my observations and artifacts organized in the notebook, made creating the presentation very easy and efficient. I did not have to "dig" through a stack of papers or through files on my computer, I had everything in one central location.
While I was not as successful in reaching my second and third goals of implementing number talks and using the smartboard, I feel I did take steps towards meeting those goals. Like I mentioned in my last post, I was able to implement a number talk, you can view a clip of that here. Since my last post, I did take a great stride toward meeting my goal of using/becoming comfortable with the SMARTBOARD. I actually downloaded the software onto my home computer and created my own SMARTBOARD slides to use during my EDUC 430 whole group math lesson. In my reflection on the lesson, I talked about how beneficial incorporating the smartboard was. It prevented me from wasting instruction time writing/erasing on the reqular board, as the pre-needed materials were already on the slides. It also allowed me to model the exact behavior the students would be engaged in during the activity part of the lesson. Even if my first attempt/use of creating my own smartboard activity to be used during the lesson was not high-tech or flashy, it was successful and my host teacher even mentioned on the observation form that I appear very comfortable and confident while using the smartboard!
Overall, I am very pleased with how this semester went. I not only feel more comfortable in my own PDS, but I feel even more comfortable teaching a whole group lesson and sharing a classroom with a host teacher. I feel the 7 hours spent a week in a PDS were very beneficial, and I cannot wait to increase that number to 12 hours. I am also very satisfied with my time management skills this semester. I was able to complete all of my assignments without having any freak-outs like I did last year. I believe I owe much of my success to my pre-planning and organization (such as the Practicum Plan). I am looking forward to next semester!
