Full takeover has come to an end, and I am about a week away from graduation. I’ve learned a lot about myself throughout this experience and I wanted to share some goals I have for myself that reflect my teaching philosophy and who I am.
Goals that I have for myself for the future are to ensure positive reinforcement, include as much interactive and engaging lessons in my teaching, and ensure fairness for rules and expectations for all students and classes. The most important one to me is the first goal that I have: ensuring positive reinforcement. I had a lot of practice with this throughout my placement, as my coop was a great role model in keeping up with positive reinforcement and focusing more on the positive than the negative. I started calling home when students were doing exceptionally well (especially focusing on those students who did not always get the positive phone calls home), and I made sure that as a class they were rewarded either individually or as a whole when their behavior and expectations were great! For example, when all students in a class had brought their textbook to class and no time had to be spent finding students books to lend or escorting them to lockers, I would ensure to give the class staRRR tickets and extra bonus points in our class cup. This kept the students spirits high and encouraged them to continue following the expectation or good behaviors. The second goal is including as much movement and engagement in my lessons as possible. I noticed how well my students progressed from our first pair and group project to where I am at now when each class. It’s always a scary thing to try out for the first time. You think to yourself will they get too loud, will students not stay on task, will someone feel left out or feeling like they are doing all the work, etc. As time goes on, as long as expectations are laid out to the students and there is time to practice working in groups, creating jigsaw lessons, and playing games for a review game the students become more used to the routine. I want to continue doing this in the future and including even more group lessons and activities, technology, and jigsaw lessons. The last goal I have for myself is to make sure fairness and rapport are throughout the classroom. I want to create a safe space for each of my students. I want all my students to enter my classroom knowing they are cared about, I want them to be there, and that though everyone may not be the best of friends in the room they are respectful to each other. Creating this type of environment is something I am still working on. A lot of this semester was already laid out for me. My students had gone through these discussions and consequences with my cooperating teacher from the beginning of the year. I want to ensure the same for my classroom by laying out expectations, consequences, and rules from the beginning of the year and holding all classes and students equally accountable.
