Looking Back

I learned a lot through my teaching placement over the course of the semester, and, looking back, I may have learned more from the problems that inevitably popped up that from the lessons that went smoothly. I think the biggest lesson was about the way I relate to my students. As much as I'd like to be, I am not their friend. I have to learn to distance myself in order to maintain a professional role while still letting them know that I care about them and will be there for them. That has been a challenging lesson for me to learn, especially coming from a background where I have done A LOT of babysitting. As a babysitter, your job is to keep the kids safe and let them have a good time, and I think, without realizing it, I carried that perspective with me into my teaching placement. I started off measuring success by how interested the kids seemed or how much they were enjoying the lesson. I still think those things are important-- if kids are interested and engaged, they are more likely to pay attention and more likely to want to learn more. However, not every lesson can be or will be an activity that leaves students begging for more. I learned that success is measured by how well the students learning met my objectives for that lesson. Even though we talked about this in class, it took actually putting it all into practice for the understanding to sink in.

Another big thing I learned was the time that goes into many good lessons. It takes much more effort that I ever realized to sift through the information and make lessons that are interesting but not overwhelming for students, and to come up with activities that effectively reinforce the KUDs and formative assessments that reflect student learning. I also saw that new twists on old activities can make even the typically pointless activities I did as a kid into useful tools to reinforce learning.

A third big thing I observed was the way that time limits and curriculum influence teaching. While I see the benefits of standardized testing in creating a standard for all schools so that students ideally enter each grade with similar knowledge and understanding and can move forward together, the time limits and important facts that our students had to know became a driving force behind our curriculum, and sometimes drove other things out. In coming up with ideas for my lessons, I encountered a number of really great activities I would have loved to do, but based on our schedule and time restrictions, the activities were impractical-- they involved having students spend time studying and creating projects related to explorers, which just wasn't feasible. And I encountered similar issues related to the SOL content. Even when I found what appeared to be great resources, I found myself scouring them to make sure they covered the desired content, because I knew we didn't have time to stray too far from the SOLs. While I hope that in my own classroom, the pace will not be so frenetic (our teacher told us they usually spend at least 2-3 weeks on the content we taught in 5 lessons), I know that these aspects of teaching will continue to play a role in my life as a teacher.