My first day of CSL, I quickly realized that I will be teaching multiple different classes every day. This means that I need to know more than one hundred different students, their names, their faces, and how they learn. The big problem …show more content…
My first day teaching my grade sixes a language lesson I posed a question to the group and I received responses as you would expect. The one thing I did not expect was students giving me answers that were not their best. At the beginning of the lesson I was hesitant to correct students in front of the class but as the class went on their answers were not getting any better. I wanted the students to have to do some thinking so the next answer I received that was not quality I responded with “do you think that sounds like a grade six answer? In grade six we need to think deeper and try to use more effective language in our writing.” The class then got very quiet and my AT seemed impressed. Immediately after the responses I was getting about the writing we were analyzing blew me away. I could not get over how much they knew, but they needed to be pushed to be able to articulate their thinking. Now when I’m doing anything with students I ask them if they are doing their best work. It seems to be working well in getting them to delivery quality …show more content…
I spend a portion of my day in the kindergarten class and I have learned many things about how kinders function as a result. The most important being that kinders need to understand what you expect of them so that they behave accordingly. They are not too young to understand what being quiet means or what it means to sit still for a few minutes. They simply need to be expected to do so. The first time I was with the kindergarten class we had to walk to the library and they did not walk quietly or even walk at all. Their teacher then decided to repeat our walk to the library until the students learn that there is a specific way in which we walk around the school. They had to do the walk three times, but by the end of the exercise all students followed the rules. Excusing them because of their age will not help them develop life skills; it will simply set them back for their future. Another example of how raising expectations will help students achieve happened with my grade four/five class. We had them do some writing about their science experiment and some submitted work written in pen, marker, or crayon. Some did not feel that they should follow the lines, and some felt no need to write anything worth reading. After receiving this unacceptable work we decided that we needed to have a checklist for students to follow when