Letter to Me

To my senior in high school self,

You are graduating from high school soon! This is your senior in college self and I am graduating soon too. You have so much to look forward to in the next 4 years. You will achieve your long-term goal of becoming an English teacher in just 4 short years.

I have been a pretty successful student in college. I managed my time as well as I could. I took every teaching experience opportunity that I could fit into my schedule. I got to know as many teachers and staff members that I could at every school that I worked at, so that I could have a strong network when it came time to look for teaching jobs.

I wish that I would have asked for more resources from all of the teachers that I have worked with. Instead I wrote ideas from lesson plans that I liked in random notebooks or I just relied on my memory to remember it for when I might use it (typical Kaila thought process). I would have benefitted from asking for more lesson plans because now I have to work with the bits and pieces that I have, work a lot of things from scratch, and ask the teachers at the school I will be working with for help; I guess getting to know the teachers right from the start is not a horrible thing, so maybe this mistake that I made will not turn out to be such a horrible thing.

The College of Education’s teacher program helped to prepare me for teaching on my own in many ways. This program gets its students into classrooms each semester in order for them to see different: grade levels, school settings, demographics, and teaching styles. I have gotten close to 3 different teachers in the 2 years that took for me to complete the program. Being in and out of different classrooms helped me to find out how I am going to manage my future classroom. The College of Education placed me with 3 wonderful teachers and I am thankful that I did not have any bad experiences with my cooperating teachers. My (our) cooperating teacher for student teaching year is an amazing teacher and an awesome person. I could not have asked for a better cooperating teacher. I have learned so much from her. She has made me feel more confident in my teaching abilities and I feel like I am more prepared for teaching than I was before my student teaching semester.

If I could change a few things about Wichita State’s College of Education program one of them would be getting students into field placements sooner and for a longer period of time in order to get them used to life as a teacher. The Cooperating Education program at WSU helped me out a lot when it came to getting used to being in the classroom and working with students all day, but I know that many of my classmates did not get the opportunity to be a part of this program. Another thing that I would change about the English Education program would be to have students take a mandatory grammar class because I am about to graduate and my grammar knowledge a bit fuzzy because I have not had to use it extensively for my whole college career and now I am expected to know it and teach it in a few months. A more in-depth special education class would have been helpful to have as well because many teachers have to teach at least one class within a class and they need to know how to work with students who have mild to moderate special needs. Other than those things, WSU’s education program is excellent.

Your college years will be a bit rough at times. Just a heads up, Alexander and you will not make it through the first year of college together, but you will meet someone amazing soon enough. Do not get caught up in the small stuff. Stay focused. These next four years will be some of the strangest and most awesome years of your life. Take every opportunity to try something new and interesting. Do not change who you are for anyone because you are awesome.

An eleven year goal of yours is just four short years away from being accomplished. Always keep this goal in mind. You got this.

Have an awesome summer,

Kaila, your senior in college self J

Okay class, let’s re-focus and listen. Blog Post #3

Hello!

Graduation is approaching quickly, everyone! I am so glad that the KPTP madness is over. My unit over The Crucible ended pretty well. Students are happy to be done with the play though. That play is a beast to tackle with CWC students. I learned so much while teaching this unit. I learned the language in The Crucible is even more difficult for students to understand now than it was when I read it 7 years ago. I had to have all of my background knowledge and explanations planned out before each reading because I never knew what students would have trouble understanding.

I have been trying to keep the article “Never Work Harder Than Your Students” in mind while I have been teaching over the past 2 months. I tried a lot of open (Socratic like) discussions when students needed to discuss acts of the play and they went over pretty well. I did not feel as worn out at the end of the days when students did the most talking which is what the article said would happen.  I am still working on allowing enough wait –time. I tend to get impatient and I hint at the answer before students actually have enough time to think of the answer.

The thing that I need to work on the most is being assertive when it is my time to talk. I tend to wait until students are quiet and this eats through a lot of class time sometimes. The things that I have tried so far have not been too successful:

• Talking over the class…never works… I tried it once or twice.
• Waiting for the class to finish talking…they take this as me saying that it is okay to talk for the rest of the hour.
• Letting my frustration show through my facial expression because my patience is low due to a sinus headache…this gets a pity “Be quiet, Miss Schmidt is trying to talk!” from a handful of students.
• Saying “Okay, let’s re-focus and listen.”…this seems to work two thirds of the time.
• Staring at the student that will not quit talking until they stop talking…this worked once, but I doubt that it will ever work again.

Is there something that someone has tried in a class of very social students that has worked well most of the time?  I might also need to focus on my “teacher voice” to make sure that I sound firm and serious (but not mean) when I am trying to get their attention. Some of my juniors told me that holding students during passing period might work because some of their teachers do it, but I am hesitant to do that because my CT has never done that and I do not think that they will take me seriously or react well to it because it is not part of the classroom routine that they are used to. Harry Wong always advises that the first week of school is critical, so I definitely intend to make sure that students understand how I will get the class to re-focus and pay attention to me along with all of my other procedures within that first week.

Other than my search for the most effective way to get students’ attention, the last few weeks have been positive and productive. I hope that everything is going well for everyone!

Stepping into the Lion's Den (Blog Post #2)

Hello everyone!

This week I started teaching my first unit; it is over The Crucible. It is going pretty well so far. I started off with some cool pre-reading activities. I walked students through a discussion over the main themes in the play on the first day and all three classes did a good job with it. The only issue that I had with that day was that I was having a rough time getting a variety of students to share their opinions. Does anyone have any effective methods of picking high school students to share without making them feel singled out or like they are in elementary school? I attempted to do an “I do. We do. You do,” type of scaffolding, that we have read about in the Smag text, during that lesson in order to show them that it was all about their opinion and that there were no specific or right answers that I was looking for.

The next day I tried out an activity that I have not seen before for the The Crucible (I have been a part of a couple units over The Crucible through CO-OP), so I have been basing some things off of those units, but I have been trying to come up with new stuff too. So I had students read the article “How to Spot a Witch” (a lot of teachers use this article to give a bit of historical background about the history of the witch trails and witch hunts in general) and after they got done reading it, I had them create 3 new ways to spot a witch to get them to be creative and have some fun before we dive into The Crucible. The majority of students had fun with the activity, but for some reason some of them took the instruction to be creative as “let’s get off task and talk instead of work,” so I had to keep on these students to make sure that they kept working. I am trying to not be a timid person that they can walk all over. I hope that I find the a way to regain the attention of a class that works well for me because standing and waiting for the class to notice that I have something to say to them , while it may work for some people, it is not working out so well for me. I am trying out all of the tricks and suggestions that all of our classroom management texts from past classes have written about, but I haven’t found the best one yet.

On the third day the classes started the play. I was impressed by reading that the first 2 classes did, but the last class read their parts in such monotone voices that it put some students to sleep. I do not know how to get students to be more pumped up and read with enthusiasm…I think that I might show them a performance of the first act in order to show them how parts should be read and then maybe they will read with more expression next time.  Does anyone have any other suggestions? I also learned that I need to practice giving more wait-time. The article about not working harder than your students that we read last week is what got me thinking and analyzing my use of wait-time and I notice that it needs some improvement.

I am learning pretty quickly that it is a challenge to make plays interesting for students who do not enjoy reading or watching plays. I am attempting to persuade my students who are pretty loud and opinionated to read the major parts during class, so far most of them have agreed to read every day and hopefully they continue to do so.

See you all next week in class!

Miss Schmidt

 

Student Teaching: Month One (Blog Post #1)

Student teaching has been a blast so far. I am finding out that collaboration with my CT and other teachers is actually pretty useful, helpful, and fun. I haven’t gotten to teach my unit yet like most of all of you because my CT and I have decided to get the junior research project out of the way while students have the most motivation since the project takes so much time and energy. My CT also said that she has tried doing the project at the end and at the beginning of the semester and she said that she has a high turn in rate if she has them jump in with the project at the start of the semester. I think that this is a good move on our parts because the students get to get the hard part of the semester out of the way first and it also gives us more time to grade them instead of waiting until the end of the semester like most teachers do. Some students have actually told us thank you for making them do this project first which was cool to hear.

 

I had fun a couple days ago coming up with my big project for my unit over The Crucible. We came up with a character analysis project that requires them to use Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, or Glogster.(Semi-side note: I was excited when my CT and a history teacher that we co-teach an AVID class with thought that Glogster was awesome and we actually used it on Wednesday in  the AVID class for a character analysis of the main character of Into the Wild.) My CT rarely gives out the typical multiple choice and essay test, she would much ather hrave them do some sort of project to have them demonstrate their knowledge of a novel, play, concept, etc. I agree with her way of assessing knowledge, so it is pretty cool to work with her and create assignments together. The project that we came up with is pretty cool, so I can send you the instructions and the rubric if you wish.

 

I am really enjoying getting to know all of my students really well. They are all so fun and interesting. I finally have all of their names memorized and put to faces, which feels amazing because some of their names were a bit difficult to get down. I am so happy that most of my students already trust me enough to ask me for help in class and talk to me during passing period and down time in class. I think building relationships with all of them is my favorite part of student teaching so far since I haven’t taught any units yet. Last weekend I had a song stuck in my head that a couple girls sing all the time in my seventh hour while I was at work and it was kind of cool in a way (even though the song is actually pretty obnoxious). I told the girls on Monday about it and they looked surprised that I was thinking about them over the weekend and they also laughed about it; after I told them about the song getting stuck in my head, they have been talking to me more during class all week.

 

I am so happy that I haven’t had a bad experience during my student teaching yet. I am having an awesome time and I am learning so much.