Lesson Reflection:
Overall, I am extremely proud of the lesson and how it was excited. I had already learned every student's name and gotten to know a bit about them which helped tremendously and I believe worked in my favor.
I have discovered that I like to lead into a discussion or start of a lesson with questions. One thing that I will have to remember to do is check the questions. Do they lean in the direction I wan the students to explore? Are they purposeful? Do they make the students think about their own projects as well as can they transfer the skills they are learning today? I think leading a demo with questions and having the students learn from the answers given is a big part of my own teaching style and something I want to get better at and more confident in my questions in order to use this technique on a daily basis. The classroom I taught in had a divers group of students with all different personalities, work ethics, noise levels and moods during class. The hardest time I had with a student was when I confronted her because I could tell she was having a bad day, and trying to see how I could help, but all she wanted was to be left alone to work on her piece. In the moment, all I could do was walk away. I didn't want to push her in a direction she was uncomfortable with and she was on task in the sense of the classroom, but her mood and feelings were raw. In this case, I did not want to condone being off task, but the mindset was elsewhere. So my question to that situation is, where do you draw the line when the student is being productive, but you can tell something is wrong? Another situation I was in was with a student I thought of as a handful or someone you would say "here comes trouble" to, but to my surprise I fed of of that students energy. Although redirects may need to be given, the student is engaged and making connections between what he is doing and the outside world. Carrying out conversations during work time, but bringing the conversation back to the art in the end. I was nervous on how I would react to the bigger personalities in the classroom- the most valuable information I have learned thus far is that each and every one of those personalities is different so you should treat them that way. AVID:AVID was a separate component from the EDUC 450 class. We were required to tutor in an AVID classroom once a week. I was at Fort Collins High School in a 9th grade class. The semester started with the tutors learning how to teach the process at the same time as the students learning how to engage in the process. Overall I see AVID as a positive program put in place for the middle of the road student. In the actual tutoring class it was difficult to teach the importance of the skills they were learning. The class was at the end of the day, and during the entire semester the students would not have any questions on any of the subjects they were learning about. This is what made the tutoring part difficult. We would use ACT prep questions when students did not have any of their own, but that method did not seem to help student learning, but rather it just passed the class time. I believe in the potential of the program and can see it achieving great things. My piece of advice would be to look at how the tutors are placed, and even provide back up content for the in class tutorials.
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