Comunicación 2

This week was an exciting week at my student teaching placement. I can’t believe that I only have a week left at Lincoln Hall! I’m going to miss it a lot. To start off my reflection, however, I want to discuss my goals from last week. My first goal was to come up with a good project with my cooperating teacher for the students to work on this past week. We ended up coming up with two projects they could choose from. We each made a rubric for one of the projects too. We worked very well together.

My second goal was to set up an interview with the superintendent of district 74. I emailed him this past week and am now working it out with his assistant. Tomorrow morning I will send her a copy of my resume and cover letter for him to start looking at.

My goals for the upcoming week are to maintain constant communication with Lincoln Hall even after I’m finished with my placement there. My second goal is to have a great final week at Lincoln Hall and to make sure I leave as a good role model to all of my students.

The word that I choose to describe this week is practice, because practice makes perfect. My students worked on their projects this week and did a great job when performing them. When they first got their projects, some students saw it as overwhelming, but we tried to reassure them that we’d gone over the information before and now it was their turn to get a little more practice with the material. We also finished the review this week and started some brand new material. They had a lot of questions about it, but by the end of the lesson, most students understood what was going on.

I have also learned how important effective communication is in the classroom. Not only between my cooperating teacher and I, but also with other teachers in the building, our students, and parents of the students. At Lincoln Hall, we meet with the eighth grade team three times a week to discuss various things and make sure everyone is on the same page and to bring up any issues concerning students. We also need to make sure we are clear when communicating with our students so they understand what we expect from them and what is going on during class. This week, my cooperating teacher spent a lot of time call the parents of students who seem to be struggling in her classroom, because she wants them to know that they are struggling before the end of the school year comes and they can’t do anything about it.

The way you communicate ideas can also be different depending on the audience and the purpose. For example, I would address a parent differently when talking about their child’s grades than the way I might bring up in the group meeting that I’m concerned about the student and how he’s doing in my class.

Because each student has different strengths, it is important to offer a variety of activities. This semester, we have come up several different ways for students to express themselves, including written, verbal, non-verbal, and visual communication. They have done various written exercises with their homework and group projects. They were also able to express themselves verbally and non-verbally with their “pregunta projects.” Students that prefer a more artistic side were able to express themselves in their “yo soy” poems. By offering so many different activities, we allow students to show us what their different strengths are. Offering choices with projects is also a good idea, because students can choose the one they think fits their strengths the best.

During students projects this week, students were able to practice effective listening. While they were being presented, students have to listen carefully, because at the end, my cooperating teacher and I would ask them what the conflict was in the skit or who the celebrity was that we were supposed to guess. (Students had to create a project in Spanish were they practiced asking different types of questions. They could either come up with a conflict and interrogate between two people or they could choose a celebrity and ask and answer questions that would lead us to who the celebrity is.)

We didn’t spend a lot of time doing any conflict resolution this week, but they were able to work on their group-facilitation skills this week as they each had one or two partners. For the most part, students seemed to work very well together and are developing good collaboration skills.

I was able to challenge students in a supportive manner as I walked around the room while they were working on their projects. If they had a question, I was there to answer it for them. Also, I checked many students work and helped them correct their mistakes in their script. I was also able to give them constructive feedback while grading students’ projects.