My Reflection On Vocabulary Rules In The Classroom

To begin the lesson, we talked about some of the vocabulary rules the students have gone over prior this lesson (with the actual classroom teacher). After this, I introduced the newest challenge – adding the “ing” and “ed” endings. I found that during this time, I talked for most of the time as I explained the “rules” of vocabulary, asking mainly closed-type questions. With the type of questions being asked during this time, there wasn’t much for student dialogue beyond the simple answers given. While we were going through this introduction, the students were seated in front of the Smart Board and we were looking over examples in a Smart Notebook file. The children seemed to be on-task and were eager to raise their hands to answer the …show more content…
We used a category chart to separate base words depending on either a consonant or vowel ending. During this time, I felt wait time was more effective, allowing students the time to think about the rule, look at the word, and come up with a possible answer. It still wasn’t the amount recommended in our reading though – It really is hard to gauge without practicing! Students were still excited to try to answer – one student who answered incorrectly one time was still raising her hand to try to answer other questions as the lesson went on. Although I’m no longer in the classroom and was “new” to these students when we began the lesson, I believe the students felt comfortable based on seeing me around the building fixing their computers and my wife is a teacher in the building so they are mostly familiar with who I …show more content…
I believe I used to do that as a teacher too and I think it was a habit that came back from three years ago when I was last in the classroom. After reading the piece about questioning, I now know that repeating student responses should not happen, but it is definitely something that needs practice to phase out. I tried to target certain questions based on the ability levels I gathered, although I really didn’t know information on ability levels or special needs prior to beginning the lesson. In this timeframe, there was only one student who asked me a question back. It was just a question of clarification to check for understanding. It was not necessarily a question where they wanted to expand further on the lesson.
I could be much better in my teaching. Being away from the classroom for three years, this took me back to my first year as a teacher. In the future, I hope to work on my questioning skills, hoping to create more open ended questions that allow the students to think deeper about a subject. I would also like to try to reduce the times when I repeat what students say, creating possible listening issues within the classroom. I think the type of lesson I worked with, in this case, had it’s limitations, but I also feel like I could have done better with it in terms of