Week Nine

This is my last week student teaching under my current CT and although I was excited to finish up the first half of my student teaching experience, I am a little bummed to leave some of the relationships that were beginning to form in the middle school.

On Tuesday I went up to Stout and had the opportunity to present to the upcoming fall and spring student teachers on student teaching and the edTPA. I remember the confusion and stress of what was to come, and wanted to calm the students down, to know that they are as prepared as they will ever be to student teach, and the bulk of learning how to teach will come in the first placement. I learned a lot about when and where to step out of my comfort zone and how to deal with many classroom management situations. I gave the students a couple of things that I wished I would have learned prior to student teaching, but am very happy to have learned it, such as exit slips and using collaboration along with questioning for formative assessment. I found that the students were mainly worried about getting a CT who they worked well with. This was on my first slide: to be open, honest, and ask questions to your CT. I definitely understand this concern, but have to say that I am incredibly lucky with my placement and that this honesty was always there.

This last week of school consisted of wrapping up the high school Studio Art quarter. All of the students who were unable to take the class another quarter were very sad to take down their studios and so was I. I experienced some of the best critiques of my life while in this classroom and really enjoyed watching unexpected relationships form around the artwork that they were making. Some of the students really found their niche in Art, while others had the opportunity to experiment with Art like they never had been able to do before.

The middle school students continued on with their first projects and became more situated into the classroom. It was a good experience to be able to watch different groups come and go through Art as well to see that there really is no norm in what the classes produce and that every single class is going to be different.