Second Week

I am placed in a 4/5 combo classroom.  There are 22 students in the class, 11 fourth graders and 11 fifth graders.  The fifth graders are in the classroom throughout the school day, other than resource, while the fourth graders leave the classroom to go to Reading and Math with a different teacher.  The fifth graders are slightly below grade level and the fourth graders are all gifted.  This is the first time that I have ever been in a classroom that was set up in such a way, however it has not been as hard to keep track of the class transitions as I thought it would be.  My mentor teacher has worked out a schedule that is effective and can easily be understood.  All of the students are well familiar with how the schedule works and there are no issues when it comes to transitioning.

The classroom is quite small, but oftentimes there are only about 11 students in the classroom.  The fifth graders are split up into three teams in the front of the class while the fourth graders are split up into two teams at the back of the classroom.  Students are seated three-six students per group or "team."  Each student in the classroom has a designated job that he or she is responsible for for the whole year.  Jobs include distributing textbooks, checking that everyone has their homework written in their agenda, and passing out papers.  This is a strategy that I want to use in my future classroom as well.  I think that providing students with jobs gives them a feeling of ownership in the class.  They are encouraged to contribute to the classroom community, which shows them that each student has an important role and that the class would not function as effectively if their roles did not exist.  However, I wonder if it is more effective to have students switch roles every month or have them keep their roles for the whole year. 

Being in the classroom for two weeks has allowed me to get to know the students on a more personal level each day.  Through interactions with them and by asking the teacher about the students, I have been able to discover information that is helpful in informing my instruction and future lesson plans.  My co-teaching partner and I also conducted surveys for a different class and were able to find out a lot of in depth information about our students.  This will certainly be used as we begin planning our own lessons in the next few weeks.  What has caught my attention is the diversity that exists in students' personal and home lives.  There are only 22 students in the class, yet each students comes from different experiences.  Still, the class is one big community, where the teacher encourages unity, acceptance, and respect.  This is something that I want to achieve in my own classroom and I wonder how my mentor teacher was able to achieve such a cohesive classroom environment so successfully.

My teaching partner and I were also able to teach a reading lesson with training and constructive feedback from out teacher.  As we practiced and taught our lesson, I thought about the "I do, we do, you do" teaching framework that we have learned about previously and that I read about in the Better Learning through Structured Teaching book required for this course.  As I read about the importance of "I do, we do, you do together, you do alone,"  I realized that this was not the way that the reading lesson was structured.  During the reading lesson, students are not engaged in group or collaborative work.  Students would read excerpts from the required story and engage in whole-group discussion.  However, students never worked collaboratively and they were not given the opportunity to practice any of the skills on their own.  Unfortunately, the reading lessons are not scheduled with such a framework in mind.  Math lessons, on the other hand, are.  During math, the teacher introduces a new skill to be mastered, guides students through a variety of problems, and asks them to work on additional problems independently.  The "you do it together" step is one that I first heard about in this book and have not seen it utilized much in the classroom.  The other three steps are used regularly in most of the lessons.  Throughout the semester, I would like to challenge myself to plan and write a reading lesson that uses this framework and see how students react to it.