Week Three

Week three of student teaching was filled with improvement. This week I had the opportunity to instruct two parts of the Fitness Gram testing, the sit and reach flexibility test and the one-mile run. As it was a short week, we did those two tests and two days of our flag football unit which is progressing really well. We started getting into game action with a bit of a twist during both days of flag football. Setting up the lines for the football field and preparing the footballs, or in other words setting up for the game was the toughest challenge for me. It was time consuming and the preparation before school wasn't well planned. Students have been looking forward to this part of the flag unit for the last week which led to a fun and engaging environment. My biggest takeaway from this week is that as a teacher you can be as creative as you would like with your units throughout a school year. Being a part of this flag football unit has allowed me to see that. One main personal insight about my teaching practice is that I need develop a specific phrase that students know means they should be paying attention. I use a few different phrases to get their attention and I think if I specify one it will be more effective. Last week I set out a goal to reach. This goal was to teach not only specific skills within flag football but encourage student to student communication and leaderships skills on the field. I feel I did well at reaching this goal. By the end of the week, I had students communicating how to set up the field and clean up after class.  They also were taking on leadership roles and communicating on their own which routes to run and who was subbing in and out during the game. My new goal for next week is going to be find an effective way to continually engage students even when they are not participating in a physical activity.

Classroom Confidential - Schmidt Chapter 3

I felt this chapter was very beneficial to read. It touches on behavior and different ways students may act in your class. I haven't experienced too many bad behaviors during my three weeks of student teaching but I know it will happen in my time student teaching and during my teaching career. This chapter is beneficial because I realize my classroom management is a skill I can work on improving. The sooner I improve my class management the less issues I will have regarding bad behaviors. My biggest takeaway from Chapter three that was connected to my student teaching experience is the frequent flyer students. Being at a junior high age group I was expecting issues related to students being frequent flyers but not to this extent. I figured a few students here and there wouldn’t be able to sit still but almost half and sometimes more than half the class tend to struggle sitting down and focusing for more than a few moments. This age group also feeds off one another. Getting them back on task has been easy to do but in my opinion the inability to focus happens too often. With my three weeks of student teaching experience, I have learned that I need to control my emotions when dealing with student behaviors. It can be tough to know which techniques to use in order to properly control the situation rather than make the situation worse.