Cooperative Learning

For my two teachers, they are on the opposite ends when it comes to group work.  In my advanced algebra classes with my other CT, we do not do any group work at all.  Most everything in that class students do individually.  Then, with my other CT, we usually do group work everyday.  I think the group work is the most effective when we are using a discovery activity in class.  Sometimes we try to have the students try to answer each others homework questions.  When they do that they usually don't do it or just copy off of each other.  In the class, the students sit in groups of 4.  Usually, the group work will be as a table, or with your table partner.  Usually, the purpose of the activity is a discovery activity where the students have to do a task to find what they are learning for that day.  We usually sometimes assign them roles.  For example, we were having the students build triangles and "impossible" triangles with Anglegs.  We had them work in pairs and we assigned one person as the builder and one as the writer, then they changed roles.  This kind of makes it so that one person isn't going to do all the work while the other sits there and does nothing.  We really don't have any type of accountability for the students.  The only sort of accountability we have is just asking them what they found when we bring it back as a group.  With our groups, the main role of the teacher is to keep the students on task while they are doing the task.  I think without this supervision and push to complete the task, the studetns would never complete it on their own.

Lesson Planning

This week I am starting to do my own lesson plans for a class.  One form that my CT gave me uses the 5 E's.  The five E's are engage, explore, explain, elaborate, and evaluate.  My CT said that this is the one that the department uses when they have to do evaluations.  I like using this one because it gets you to think about what can come up during the lesson, more than what is actually in the lesson.  At our school our lessons and activities are very similar for each teacher.  So this lesson plan template gets you to anticipate what is going to come up and questions that the students may ask.  I don't think that I am the best at planing these those because I just haven't had the experiences designing them for students.  However, I do think that when I get more experiences with actual students, my lesson plans will get exponentially better.

Student Teaching Week 1

One of the classrooms that I am in, the desks are put into groups.  This, I think, helps build a sense of community among the students.  They are always working in pairs or in groups.  In the other room that I'm in the class is in rows.  This doesn't really build a sense of community in the class.  However, the teacher seems to know something about every student in the class.  She has something to talk about with each students and that helps build that community.  One thing that is going well is that there haven't been any kids that have been misbehaving.  They seem to all be well behaved and won't cause that many problems in the future.  One idea that I have come up with is to use my iPad and notability for the notes when I eventually take over the classroom.  Both my teachers write under the doc cam or just on the board.  This will make it easier to upload onto the website for the students and it also may be easier for the students to see because the doc cam is kind of hard to see in my classrooms.  There aren't that many special rules that are in my classes.  Both of my teachers haven't really communicated what the consequences of breaking the rules are to the class.