Student Teaching: Week 12!

I'm continuing to drop classes, at this point I am down to only three classes. Now that I have only a few classes I've been trying to do new things that I have more time to plan and someday implement into my program. One thing I tried and learned was creating a lab which required students to bring in materials from home. I assured the students that they should spend absolutely NO money on this project! The items they bring in could be an empty milk carton, a plastic bottle, soda can, basically they were instructed to "dig through their clean trash" and bring in 5 items. They would be given 1 bonus point for each item brought in. With this material they were going to make a 3-D structure of a cow. After having the structure created they were going to label body parts. I thought this would be a great way to address multiple intelligence's and unleash creativity in the classroom...

The lab was a complete flop. After giving them three days to bring in materials I had two items in my hands! I couldn't believe it, I was giving them an opportunity to receive 5 bonus points for bringing in a milk jug! I had to change plans, scratch the lab and do a one day lesson on the body parts.

Through this experience I learned that I cannot rely on students to bring in materials to be used for class. If I had been teaching for 5+ years I could have accumulated various objects to be used in a lab like this but I have no such collection. I do want to try this lab again because I think it would be a good lab but next time I will give the students more of a notice and I will raise the stakes, so maybe 2 bonus points per item, and I will create my own collection prior to the lab.

I was able to visit/observe a fellow student teacher this week and check out their program! I was really impressed with the program. They actually had two classrooms! Most two teacher programs I have been in are two teachers but one classroom, one teaches in the shop full time, one in the classroom full time. The student teacher also did a great job with her Veterinary Science class! It was evident that her passion lies in Veterinary Science. I commend her for utilizing her resources and having a community member bring in a dog to use for demonstration purposes. She did an excellent job of continuing to refer to her objectives. I liked the way she would address one objective and then ask the students what they were doing next. To answer the question they had to look at the objectives posted! It was a great technique for ensuring that students are aware of the expectations. Some areas of improvement that I had for this student teacher was one: assign groups to projects. After students were allowed to pick their groups I feared that they weren't going to complete the assignment because they were with their friends; two: make the connections more obvious, she had a great interest approach where she left the lights off for the first 10 minutes of class while discussing the green industry. My suggestion was to address the lights being off in the beginning with a question and then after the beginning discussion ask that question again.

Next week I will have only one more class left. This is my freshman class that I began with. I had a really rough start with this class, I worked through my really bad teaching moments with this class and did some really great things with this class. I'm glad that I have this class the longest, I enjoy teaching this class the most. It'll be hard to give this class back.