Service Learning Reflection

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  Field Experience Service Learning Project  

1. Provide demographics of school, number of students in class and who your cooperating teacher is. Ridgeline Elementary School is located in Highland, Utah. The economic living conditions within the school boundaries range from upper to average income levels. There are 790 students total in grades K-6 including a preschool.  Mrs. McCracken’s 6th grade class, in which we were assigned to, is made up of 32 students, 20 girls and 12 boys. The students range in age from 11 to 12 years old. One student is Asian, another Philippino, and the other 30 are Caucasian. The achievement levels are generally at grade level in math and reading.  Students in the class seem eager to learn and are well behaved.

2. How is your relationship with your cooperating teacher? Explain.                Our relationship with Mrs. McCracken was very friendly and professional.  We had an open dialogue and effective communication from the very beginning.  She was very good about giving compliments as well as constructive criticism regarding our lessons.  We found it very helpful to discuss each lesson with her after completion.  Most often the advice she gave us was very helpful and appreciated.  She knows her students better than we do and would give us advice on how to integrate our teaching techniques in order to better accommodate specific individual student needs, as well as advice relating to her past teaching experiences she has had that would help us in our future teaching opportunities.
3. How does he/she feel about the technology piece you created?        Mrs. McCracken liked our digital story. She felt it was very affective with her class and appropriate for the grade level.  We think that it was fun for her because she doesn’t use much technology in her classroom. As a long time teacher she has most of her routines nailed down and doesn’t seem to want to change things up as much. Unfortunately, technology implementation is seen more as a burden than a benefit to her at her career level.
4. How does he/she feel about the lesson you completed?          The lesson we taught incorporating  the digital story about tombs, pyramids, and the afterlife of Ancient Egypt went very well.  Mrs. McCracken said that she enjoyed it and felt that we had done a wonderful job of keeping the students engaged with the material.  We had to extend it into a second day because the they were so full of questions and comments. She said that is a good sign that their brains are turned on and they are in learning mode.
5. How did the the training session go? Explain.                Mrs. McCracken didn’t have much interest in learning how to make a digital story.  She said she uses more traditional means of teaching in her classroom because she doesn’t have time to create customized technology for her lessons. The Principal has standards that he sets for the school and although the school is equipped with advanced technology in most places, the teachers feel a lot of pressure from him to keep test scores up, so rather than spend time creating new technology themselves they rely on what’s already available.  At the time of our instruction the 6th grade was putting on a play at the request of the principal. It was a high pressure time for all the teachers. This possibly made them feel even less inspired by the idea of implementing digital stories into their already overwhelmed schedule.
6. How do you feel about this service-learning experience?        Because of the particularly stressful time and busy schedule of the play Mrs. McCracken seemed a little flustered with technology and didn’t want much advice on changing things in her classroom or learning how to make and use digital stories.   We were therefore not afforded the opportunity to implement the service-learning experience.  
7. What did your cooperating teacher gain from the experience?   Because Mrs. McCracken was able to experience the success of our digital story with her students, we hope that she will be more open in the future to learning how to make digital stories and implement  them into her classroom.
8. What did you gain from the experience?    It was a good experience to see how well the students enjoyed the digital story and how it enhanced our lesson.  Using our digital story to introduce the highlights of our lesson and foreshadow what they were going to learn was exciting for the students.  We did have issues with the combination of the speakers and our computer making the audio a little difficult to hear, but it didn’t even seem to phase the students.  We were able to learn a lot from using it with students and observing them engage with it than we could have otherwise.   
9. Was it worth it?  Why or why not?   In the beginning when we were spending so much time researching and creating our story, we weren’t sure it would be worth the effort. But with how well the students liked it, we realized it‘s something we would like to use in our classrooms and keep for years of reuse. It’s always a good thing to add variety to a classroom and change things up in order to keep student interest. However, because of the time it took to make a digital story we would want lobby for other teachers to implement them as well so that we could share.  With the forecasted busy schedule we will all have, it would save a lot of time and still give the same benefits to the students.

Classroom management in the field

At this point in our field experience in Mrs. M's 6th grade class, I have been thinking a lot about two things in particular: classroom management and discipline/behavior techniques.  Although the students in the class are for the most part excellent kids, there are some minor behavior problems on occasion and times when a student doesn't complete work as assigned.  In these cases, there should be a set discipline technique set in place.  The teacher is inconsistent in her discipline techniques and her classroom is not always managed in a way that seems to make much sense to me, or to the students!
Perhaps some of the mayhem is from an upheaval of routine due to practicing for a 6th grade production of Annie that took place this week.  The students practice 1.5 hours in the morning and the afternoon.  Because of this, their normal routine is knocked off schedule. The teacher fits curriculum into small windows of opportunity that may randomly present themselves.  There is no set schedule for language arts, math, or social studies. The only consistency in the schedule is silent reading at the beginning and end of the day. 
I believe that students thrive much better on a schedule and with consistency in discipline, technique, and learning times.  Changing the schedule every now and then to accomodate something special is different than having craziness for months straight.  I want to make sure that when I am a teacher in charge, my students always know what to expect in my classroom-in all the varieties of the days work!

Beginning field reflection

What?
This week we started our field experience.  I am working in a 6th grade class in Alpine.  The class is very well behaved and I am learning a lot. 

So What? 
     I think field experience is a great learning experience.  There are two things that stand out to me the most so far.  The first is the importance and difficulty of classroom management. Even great ideas and perfectly designed curriculum based lesson plans, without the ability to manage a classroom in an orderly and successful way, the teaching and instruction will fail.  I think classroom management techniques must vary by student and teacher relationships.  What works for one teacher or classroom may not work for another set of students or teacher.  To me, it seems tricky to manage.  I am more concerned about classroom management than about actually teaching.  i didn't anticipate that feeling.
     The second is the value of classroom dynamics and the diversity in each classroom, school, and city. The class I have been working with has 32 students which are all very well behaved.  They are polite, work hard, and though they are kids and are not perfect, seem like a class full of potential and motivation. There is very little concerns for learning. The teacher has told us there are only 3 students below grade level and even they seem to be putting forth an effort of their own kind. However, I have talked to other students in field right now who have very poor discipline in their classrooms and students who require multiple levels of intervention.  I can imagine this is more the case than not and it makes me wonder what the influences are and how the classroom management techniques can affect this kind of student problem.

Now What?
     I hope that in the next few weeks of field I will be better able to get more of a feel for how to fit curriculum pertinent lesson planning into the time allotted for each subject.  Because the 6th grade at this school is currently working on a musical production that will be performed the end of the month, I feel that there is not enough curriculum teaching going on.  When time is short I think there has to be creativity in teaching to cover the needed areas.  I think that will be a good thing to observe with our cooperating teacher. I also want to work on my classroom management file with ideas that seem successful in her well behaved classroom.  As I work on my teacher work sample it will be good to see how the statistics of the schools and city relate to the classroom dynamics between my experience and others.  With little experience in the 6th grade age group, I am enjoying my observation and hope to feel more prepared for my career as a teacher.