Standard 5 Literate
Environment
Understand the role of routines in creating and maintaining
positive learning environments for reading and writing instruction using
traditional print, digital, and online resources.
During my experience student
teaching in the eighth-grade, my student teacher did a great job of showing me
the best way to structure a classroom and use all instructional time to my
advantage. When working with students of all ages, I quickly realized that only
doing one activity the entire class period is not a beneficial way to keep
students engaged the entire time. Instead, teachers should break the lesson
into different activities to make sure students have an equal balance of interacting
with each other, reading, writing, and participating in creative and critical
thinking skills. I also found that when students’ minds are kept busy trying
and doing different things, classroom management as a whole becomes much easier
to manage. Students who are busy working on an engaging activity typically don’t
have time for their minds to wonder into trouble. This, or course is not a guaranteed
way to avoid having to discipline a student, but it definitely helps make the
classroom atmosphere more academic, productive, and positive.
Now, I teach 11th grade
English in a school that operates on a 90-minute block schedule. Because
students are expected to stay in the same room learning the same content for a
longer period of time, I learned that it is imperative to make a scheduled
routine that students are comfortable with. Although I usually followed my veteran
teachers’ advice, I remember teaching a lesson on Shakespeare that didn’t exactly
go well. We were nearing the end of the play and I desperately wanted to finish
so the class could move on to some much-needed SAT writing prep. Instead of
having the students break into groups, asking discussion questions, and having
them log onto their laptops to develop their blogs or projects like we had been
doing throughout the unit, I decided to pull them through the last two acts no
matter what. Ninety minutes went by and the class finished the reading, but I
realized that none of the students really paid any attention to the last five
pages of the text. The work that we had done that block had gone to waste
because I just wanted to finish the play and move on. Learning from that experience,
I decided to start teaching with a timer and keep myself and the class on a scheduled
routine. After that day, I started doing bell ringers and objective outlines.
This was a five-minute time at the beginning of the class where I projected the
schedule and objectives for that day’s class on the board. Once the students wrote
the schedule in their agenda books, they answered one question that related to
the lesson that we studied the pervious day. This was all done while I
monitored the hallway and took roll. When I finished, I reviewed the objectives
and bell ringer, leaving the class ready to start the new lesson.
After the bell ringer, I typically sectioned
class time into timed content. For thirty minutes each, the students practiced
reading, grammar, and writing, unless we were working on a larger project. Depending
on the content of the unit we were working with, sometimes reading or writing took up more time. I decided that this process was more successful because
one of the students raised her hand and asked, “Miss Latocha, how much more
time do we have left to do this?” When I replied, “about ten minutes,” she was extremely
surprised and stated that class time went by so much faster!
Below is a projected
list of activities, objectives, and a bell ringer that I had my students
complete during three different classes this year.
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